


there's no dreams in the waves, only monsters

by S_Hylor



Category: The Avengers (Marvel Movies), The Avengers (Marvel) - All Media Types, The Avengers - Ambiguous Fandom
Genre: Alternate Universe - No Powers, Holding Hands, How to Survive a Horror Story rule #1 don’t get separated, M/M, Phantasmat (video game), Psuedo Horror, Thriller, copious amounts of hand holding, descriptions of death and dead bodies
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-11-21
Updated: 2017-11-21
Packaged: 2019-02-05 05:12:10
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 70,441
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12787725
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/S_Hylor/pseuds/S_Hylor
Summary: Driving while tired is never a good idea, especially when the weather is terrible, as Tony finds out the hard way. Now in pain, with a wrecked car and no phone service, Tony is stranded at a hotel perched on a cliff overlooking the flooded ruins of an abandoned town in the valley below. With no working phone, only three other people around, Tony isn’t sure who to trust or what to believe. Something isn’t right, something is stopping him from leaving.





	there's no dreams in the waves, only monsters

**Author's Note:**

> I can't believe I actually made it to this stage. I can't believe I actually finished something and submitted it to the Cap/Iron Man Big Bang. Super shout out to my wonderful artists, my long suffering sister, and to my friends who acted as test audiences for this story. 
> 
> The story itself is inspired by the Big Fish game Phantasmat. 
> 
> Art from the superb [mitochondrials](http://archiveofourown.org/users/mitochondrials)
> 
> Art on Devaintart: [One](https://mitochondrials.deviantart.com/art/There-s-No-Dreams-In-The-Waves-Only-Monsters-716240945?ga_submit_new=10%3A1511294943&ga_type=edit&ga_changes=1&ga_recent=1), [Two](https://mitochondrials.deviantart.com/art/There-s-No-Dreams-In-The-Waves-716240971?ga_submit_new=10%3A1511294914&ga_type=edit&ga_changes=1&ga_recent=1) (the second picture is kind of spoiler-ish for the end of the story, but it is so so beautiful)
> 
> Art by the wonderful [KakushiMiko ](http://kakushimiko.tumblr.com/)
> 
> Art of Deviantart: [One](https://kakushimiko.deviantart.com/art/there-s-no-dreams-in-the-waves-only-monsters-1-716255045), [Two](https://kakushimiko.deviantart.com/art/there-s-no-dreams-in-the-waves-only-monsters-2-716256098), [Three](https://kakushimiko.deviantart.com/art/there-s-no-dreams-in-the-waves-only-monsters-3-716256279), [Four](https://kakushimiko.deviantart.com/art/there-s-no-dreams-in-the-waves-only-monsters-4-716256438), [Five](https://kakushimiko.deviantart.com/art/there-s-no-dreams-in-the-waves-only-monsters-5-716256619). (Four and Five are a little spoiler-ish, so be warned, but they are gorgeous, so feel free to look if you don't mind spoilers.)
> 
> Disclaimer time: All characters are the property of Marvel and their creators, I'm just borrowing them for the purpose of fanfiction. 
> 
> The title of the story is from the song Unbecoming by Starset, though as it turns out, I got the lyrics wrong when I was singing along with it, and the actual lyrics are supposed to be "there are no dreams in the lakes, only monsters". 
> 
> Also on the topic of the title and the lyrics, the next line in the song is "and the monsters are my only friends", so do with that, what you will. 
> 
> I chose not to use any of the archive warnings for this story since I thought gave too much of the story away, but there are warnings in the end notes if you want to know before reading this. 
> 
> This story hasn't finished being beta read yet, due to me writing far too much, not giving my beta enough time to read this, and also her not feeling very well for the last month or so. I will update with the edits later, in the mean time, any glaring mistakes that bug you beyond belief, please feel free to let me know in the comments.

As much as he hates to admit it, Tony thinks he might just be lost. Somewhere along these back roads he must have taken a wrong turn. Rain continues to beat down on the windscreen, droplets bouncing off the bonnet of his car as he eases off the accelerator a fraction. Not much, just enough to compensate for the reduced visibility. His headlights are a joke, barely illuminating anything, they throw down the road a way, but do nothing to brighten the sides of the road. He wishes he’d taken the time to install spotlights before he left, but no, he was in a hurry, he was already running late, and he’d never expected to still be driving after dark.

His eyes ache from peering through the windscreen. Or maybe it’s the lack of sleep. The take away coffee he bought when he stopped for fuel three hours ago was long since empty, as are the two cans of Red Bull he’d bought for later on in the drive.

Later on in the drive had come and gone, and Tony is ready to admit that he really is lost. Depressingly, terribly lost.

Without glancing away from the windscreen, Tony fumbles blindly for the road map on the passenger seat. Dragging it over to him he chances a glance away from the road to study the map. Nothing looks right. He blinks a few times, squinting at the map.

Nothing looks right at all.

He turns the map over, propping it against the steering wheel, but the reverse side doesn’t look any better. This isn’t the map he looked at this morning when he was studying the route to take. He flips it again, then, scrunching it in one hand against the steering wheel he reaches for the passenger seat again, leaning over to rummage through the newspaper he bought looking for the map he’s sure he packed.

His vision swims. Shit, he’s tired. He really should pull over and have a nap, but he’s already late, and all he wants to do is get to Rhodey’s place and crash and not wake up until the next day.

He blinks to clear the weird greyness from his vision and straightens up, giving up the map for a lost cause.

The car has drifted into the other lane. Not far, just the wheels over the centre line, and the straight road stretches on in front of him devoid on any traffic or animals. Tony lets the car stay where it is, feeling more comfortable the further away from the inky blackness of the road sides that he is.

His vision blurs again. It looks like his windscreen has suddenly fogged over. Lights flash into the windscreen. Oncoming headlights. _Where the hell did they come from?_ Tony’s not sure.

He starts to guide the car back into his lane, but then there’s a blaring of a horn and the headlights are suddenly so much closer than before. Fuck.

He jerks the wheel, every instinct telling him not to, but it’s too late. The car lurches back into the correct lane, too far, too violently. A metal guard rail looms in the headlights. He jerks he wheel back the other way, the tyres start slipping, rubber screeching against the wet road, and before he can do anything, before he can even think, the car skids across the road and straight into the guard rail on the other side.

He jerks in his seat, thrown forward against the seat belt, his head snapping forward and back and everything hurts.

The car’s still going, crunching through the railing with a screech of metal on metal, and pitching straight down the embankment on the other side.

The world goes black.

///

“Hello?”

“Hello?”

“Is anyone alive down there?”

Tony comes to slumped against the steering wheel. His nose hurts. His ribs hurt. Breathing hurts. And his head keep spinning.

“Urgh.” It’s the most intelligent thing he can think to mutter. Carefully he brings his hands up, sets them against the steering wheel and pushes himself back upright. Vaguely he thinks he shouldn’t move, that he might have sustained a neck or spinal injury, but more than anything he wants to get the pressure of the seatbelt off his chest.

“Hello? Is anyone in there?”

Oh, Tony thinks, collapsing back into his seat. He wasn’t imagining the voice. He turns his head, peers out through the rain-splattered glass and thinks that he can see a light outside. He fumbles with his seatbelt, trying to get it undone, but it won’t give.

There’s a scuffling sound outside the car and then something connects with the side of the vehicle with a dull thump. Tony tries to twist further around to see, but his neck aches too much.

“Help.” The word rasps out of his throat, makes him cough, which spikes pain through his chest.

“Hang on!” The voice comes again from outside. A light flashes against the glass, and a shadow looms outside the window. “I’m going to get you out of there. Just hang on.”

There’s the sound of someone trying to door latch, but the door doesn’t budge.

“It’s stuck. Hang on.” A hand appears on the glass, long fingers leaving muddy tracks that catch the raindrops. “Just hang on. I’ll get you out.”

Tony keeps trying to undo his seatbelt, fingers scrabbling at the clasp but it doesn’t give. He can feel panic starting to rise, every breath coming too fast and too hard, each one catching in his chest and burning against his ribs.

There’s a sudden smash behind him, it makes him jump, twist so he can see the rear view mirror. The back window is gone, shattered glass littering the back seat, and then there’s a man, crawling up onto the boot of the car and scrambling through the back window.

“Hey, okay. I’m going to get you out. Can you move?” The man drops into the back seat, wriggling right forward until he’s leaning in between the front seats so he can see Tony.

Tony nods, because he is sure he can move. Things might hurt, but his arms move, he can turn his head and he feels like his legs are fine. And wow, the guy that just crawled into his car, he’s really, really cute.

So, yeah. Maybe Tony hit his head a little harder than he initially thought if that’s what he’s focusing on.

“I, I think I’m okay. I can’t.” He swallows, tries to hold off the cough that he can feel forming, because that hurts a bitch. “I can’t get my seatbelt undone.”

The guy wriggles further through the seats, gets around a bit further to look at Tony. He pushes sodden hair out of his eyes and wipes rain off his face, leaving muddy streaks on his forehead. “Right. Okay. I can get you out.”

He reaches into his belt, extracting a folding knife. “Just stay real still, okay.”

Tony does. He might not know the man from a bar of soap, but he really wants to get out of the car. He feels the man tug on the seatbelt, but can’t tilt his head down far enough to see what he’s doing, so instead he looks at his rescuer’s face. Blond hair, blue eyes, ridiculous eyelashes, and this really cute little frown crease between his eyebrows. Probably the wrong time to be ogling someone, Tony realises, but it’s really hard not to when the guy is right there, only inches from his face.

Then, suddenly, the pressure on his chest is gone, and the guy is leaning back, folding the knife closed again.

Tony sucks in a deep breath, even though it hurts his ribs. The man carefully pulls the seatbelt out of the way, then wriggles back between the gap in the seats.

“Will you be okay to climb through?” He asks.

Tony tries, because there’s no way he’s staying in the car if he can get out. He wriggles his way around, kicks off the dashboard and no matter how much it hurts, he squeezes his way between the seats, spilling into the back seat and into the man’s arms. Careful hands help him up and out through the window. The first shock of rain is bitterly cold, and Tony skids down the slippery metal of the car boot and slides right off the end. It jars his ribs, but he lands on his feet, and a moment later the man has joined him.

“You alright?” The man stands close by him, hands hovering like he wants to check Tony over, but really isn’t sure if he should touch him or not. “Oh, you’re going to get soaked. It’s freezing out here.”

Tony watches, hunching in on himself to try and fight off the cold, as the man shrugs his way out of his rain dampened leather jacket and places it carefully around Tony’s shoulders.

“Now, come on. There’s a hotel near here, only place around here. They’ve got a phone, you can use that and call for help.” The man picks up his torch from where it sits in the back window, flashing the light around.

Tony manages to make out the steep incline his car just went down and the wreckage that is his car. The whole front end is crumpled in where it has hit what looks like a power pole. When he glances around again, the man is already starting down a path that leads into the forest a few metres away. He mentioned a hotel, and a phone. That seems odd.

Tony fishes into his pocket and extracts his phone, holding it up so he can see the screen. It lights up and there’s that little annoying “No Service” statement up in the top corner. Typical. Of course there’s no signal.

“Hey, you coming?” The man has stopped, looking back at Tony, squinting at him through the rain. “What’s that?”

Tony’s momentarily distracted by the way the man’s shirt clings to his shoulders and chest. “Um, huh?”

The man frowns at him, walking back to Tony’s side. “What’s that?” He’s pointing at the phone, staring at it like he’s never seen one before.

Admittedly, it’s a phone of Tony’s own design, not available on the open market, but it’s not so entirely different from every other smart phone out there. “It’s a phone. No good though, because apparently there is no service in this place. What is this place, the arse end of no-where?”

The man glances at Tony, then looks back at his phone, eyebrows creeping up his forehead and his eyes going wide. Those ridiculous eyelashes are clumping together from the rain. “That’s a phone? No way!”

Tony stares at the man, because this man has got to be messing with him, right? What sort of phones did they have in this arse end of no-where. Obviously not cell phones if they didn’t have reception. “Yeah, but it might as well be a brick for all the good it’s doing at the moment. Like I said, no signal.”

The man keeps looking at him funny, a smile playing at the edge of his lips and disbelief shining in his eyes.

When he doesn’t say anything, and doesn’t change his expression at all, Tony waves the man on. “So, hotel, right? Phone? Call for help?”

The man just keeps staring at him.

“Me, Tarzan. You, Jane?” Tony rolls his eyes. He’s in pain, and over tired and all he wants to do is call Rhodey and get the hell out of this rain and to somewhere civilized, even if that means leaving behind his really hot rescuer. In short he’s being a sassy little shit because he’s irritated.

The man barks out a laugh, his eyes crinkling at the corners in the most adorable way possible. “Y’know, that’s the first thing you’ve said that makes sense.” He extends a hand to Tony, like he fully expects Tony to take it. “C’mon, we’ll go to the hotel and use the phone. But we’d better not linger there too long. It’s a strange place.”

Yep, Tony thinks, like that is going to make him feel any better about following a strange man into a hostile looking forest towards some dubious sounding hotel. Except, for some reason he finds himself reaching out and taking the man’s hand. He must really have hit his head hard. The man’s skin is cool to the touch, which reminds Tony that he’s got the man’s jacket wrapped around his shoulders and because of that the man’s shirt is plastered to him with cold rain. Of course his hands are cold.

The man turns and starts back towards the forest again, his torch picking out a path that cuts through the trees. “By the way, me, Steve, you?”

Steve, huh? So that was his rescuers name. Tony finds himself smiling at the man’s back. He should have figured the guy would have a wholesome sort of name like Steve. “Me, Tony.” He replies, still going with the theme.

Steve looks over his shoulder, flashing a smile at Tony, then he focuses back on the path, helping Tony over a fallen tree as they go. They pass by a dilapidated looking building that Tony thinks looks like some sort of shed, more than it might be a dwelling, but they just pass by it without even pausing. They continue down the path to the right of the building, though Tony notices another path slipping between the trees to the left of the building. He wants to ask where that goes but Steve’s grip tightens on his hand and he finds himself stumbling to keep up with Steve.

After about five minutes of twisting and turning their way along the path between the trees the forest opens up onto a grass covered flat that appears, as far as Tony can see, to be the top of a cliff. Darkness spreads out abruptly where the cliff drops away, though he can make out a distant patch of light through the rain, and an expanse of water stretching out between the cliff and the light. There’s a murky shape protruding from the water, but not matter how much he squints against the rain, Tony can’t make out the details of what it is.

A dark shape looms on the cliff top. The occasional flash of lightning brightens the scene enough that Tony can make out a large building.

Steve stops at the forest edge, pointing towards the building. “That’s the hotel. It’s one of the few buildings that is still standing from the town that was here. There was some kind of accident, a flood, I don’t know, and most of the town ended up underwater.”

That explains the expanse of water beyond the cliff; but it leaves a lot of other questions. “What sort of flood would cause there to still be so much water around?”

Steve shrugs, his grip on Tony’s hand tightens a fraction and he starts down the path towards the hotel. “I’m not real sure. I think there was a dam up higher, and the town was built in the valley, then the dam burst.”

Following along, Tony looks around him as they go. The closer they get to the hotel, the easier it is to pick out other features of the area. The lights across the water don’t become any clearer, but just outside the fence that stands around the hotel, and right on the edge of the cliff there’s something that looks like one of those view points, with the fixed binoculars. Curiosity makes Tony want to venture closer to the edge to see what there is out there in the dark beyond the cliff edge. However, he’s cold and in pain and he really, really, just wants to call Rhodey and get the hell out of this backwater sort of place that he’s wound up in.

Even if he really can’t complain about the locals so far.

The gate out the front of the hotel squeaks as Steve pushes it open, but Tony hesitates to go through it, because right beside the gate is a brass plaque which he suspects bears the name of the hotel, but the only part visible is _Hotel_. He stuffs his phone back into his pocket so he has a free hand with which he reaches out and brushes aside the leaves that cover the top part of the sign so he can read the whole thing.

 _The Drowned Dead Hotel_.

Tony feels a cold shiver slide down his spine, and he can’t help but shudder. What sort of place is this? The name is terrible, he doesn’t imagine that it’d be a real draw card for tourists, except for those morbid kinds. Besides that, if the hotel was named before the flood, then it was eerie, and if it was named after the flood, then that was just bad taste.

“Not a real friendly name, is it?” Steve is watching Tony, eyebrows cocked and a grim looking smile on his face. “C’mon, let’s get you out of the rain.”

Tony doesn’t need that invitation twice. Even with Steve’s jacket he’s feeling the cold and the rain is starting to slide down his neck. Vaguely, Tony thinks that he should have grabbed his bag from the boot of the car. His mind hadn’t really been on his luggage when they left the car. Still, the cold is making his chest ache, and he really could do with some more layers. It’s a relief to step up on to the porch of the hotel.

Steve ushers him over to the left of the door, to an area that Tony thinks might have once been a nice little sitting area or sun deck, but the chairs and table are littered with detritus. The vines growing on the porch railings have crept across the decking and started winding their way around the chair legs. There are dead leaves and broken birds nests and Tony thinks he spots bones of some sort before Steve’s torch light jerks away again. Tony half thinks Steve is going to want him to sit down, but he really really hopes not. He thinks he needs a tetanus booster before he does.

Instead, Steve lets go of Tony’s hand and bends down near the porch railings. If it wasn’t for the bad lighting, it would be a perfect perving opportunity, and Tony has to scold himself for even thinking that, though his eyes do wander over Steve’s back and rear all the same. It’s hard not to appreciate just how tightly his wet clothes cling to him.

Steve straightens up suddenly and Tony jerks his eyes away, pretending he’s been peering into the junk strewn corner instead, only for his gaze to skitter back when he sees Steve holding something.

A length of wooden pole with a hook on the end. It looks ominously dangerous, enough that Tony shuffles back a step. He hopes he didn’t just get rescued from a car crash just to be bludgeoned to death with a boat hook.

Steve, however, thankfully, doesn’t seem to notice Tony’s hesitance, and instead offers him the torch to take, before he crosses back along the porch to the window to the right of the door. Using the pole he reaches up into the rafters holding the porch roof up, the hook clattering against wood and steel for a while before he dislodges something. Tony catches a flash of silver in the torch beam right before it drops into Steve’s waiting hand. He watches as Steve leans the boat hook up against the wall and steps back over to the door.

It’s only once Steve’s fitting the key to the lock that Tony realises exactly what’s going on. He blames his lack of brain on the cold, lack of sleep, and the way that Steve’s shirt is plastered to his back. “Are you breaking into the hotel?”

Steve jerks his head around to look over his shoulder, looking mildly offended. “I work here. Sometimes. Used to. Anyway, the manager will be in bed already, most likely, so I figure there’s no harm in letting ourselves in so you can use the phone. Then we can head back to your car and wait for help.”

“Can’t I wait for help here?” Tony asks, because the idea of walking back through the forest and climbing back into his cold, wrecked car isn’t really all that appealing.

Steve’s shoulders tense, but he doesn’t reply, instead focusing on jiggling the key in the lock until the lock gives and he opens the door. “Here, get inside. I’ll see if I can find a blanket or something for you.”

Choosing not to press the unanswered question, Tony ducks inside the door that Steve’s holding open for him, and into the hotel lobby. The lack of wind makes Tony’s skin prickle hot for a moment, before his senses catch up with him and let him know that despite being out of the rain and wind, inside the hotel isn’t exactly warm. Steve shuts the door behind him tries to flick a light switch beside the door. Nothing happens.

“Must have a black out.” Steve mumbles, stepping around Tony and catching his hand again to lead him further into the room. There’s a front desk beside a staircase that leads upstairs, and a heavy looking door behind it and off to one side. In front of the desk, however, are two couches and a low coffee table that must be some sort of waiting area.

Sitting atop the coffee table is a phone. And old one, with a circular dial and spiral cord.

Tony makes a beeline for the phone, picking up the receiver and holding it to his ear. Silence greets him.

“There’s no dial tone?” That doesn’t seem right. An old phone like this shouldn’t need electricity to work. He looks at Steve, still standing beside him, still holding his hand, and Tony realises he must have towed him across the room.

Steve takes the phone receiver from his hand and holds it to his own ear. Then he nods, like it makes sense and sets the phone back down. “The phone line might be down too. Or it could be—” He pauses, glancing towards the heavy door behind the desk. “I reckon we’re going to need power. There’s an old switch board, that might need power to work.”

How old is this place? Tony wonders, then he’s distracted by the violent shiver that rattles his teeth. Then a yawn catches him by surprise. How could he have possibly forgot that he is so tired?

Settling his hands on his shoulders, Steve manoeuvres Tony until he’s sitting on one of the two couches, and crouches at his feet. “You okay?”

Tony nods, fighting off another yawn, which is a mistake, because it makes his chest hurt. “‘m fine.”

Steve squints at him, reaches up and very carefully, touches his fingertips to Tony’s chest. Right where the seatbelt had been. The touch, as gentle as it is, still makes Tony flinch back. Steve frowns, mouth turning down in the corners and he looks just so disappointed that Tony feels bad.

“You’re not fine. You crashed that fancy car of yours into a power pole. You’re not fine at all. Let me look.” It’s an order, and Steve doesn’t even pause long enough for Tony to try and pull away again, before he gives him a no nonsense look and hooks his fingers around the hem of Tony’s shirt.

It’s all Tony can do to comply, trying to fight Steve off only makes things ache even more, so he sits there, arms held out to the side as Steve carefully lifts the bottom of his shirt up until it’s bunched in Tony’s armpits and his whole chest is exposed. He feels self-conscious. Steve’s beautiful and full of muscles and Tony is decidedly not. Then he realises what he’s thinking and chastises himself because there is no way that Steve’s going to be checking him out in any kind of sexy way.

Steve’s forehead scrunches up even more, eyes narrowed, and he’s all but glaring at Tony’s chest, like it’s somehow personally offended him. Definitely not checking him out in any sort of sexy way, Tony confirms, and feels the urge to slap Steve’s hands a way and pull his shirt back down again.

He gives into that urge. Steve jerks back, rocking back onto his heels and he holds his hands up in surrender. It’s hard to see inside the hotel, the torch still on, sitting on the coffee table, but Tony thinks it looks like Steve is blushing. Which doesn’t make much sense.

“Sorry.” Steve rubs the back of his neck, pushes himself to his feet and takes a step back. “You’ve got some pretty nasty bruising there. Are you having any trouble breathing?”

Tony takes a deep breath, sucks in as much air as he can and he can feel the ache in his chest, but it all feels like it’s on the surface. With any luck that means his ribs are fine. He lets the breath out again, sagging back into the couch. “It hurts a bit, but I don’t think I’ve broken any ribs.”

Folding his arms over his chest, Steve’s face creases with concern. At least it’s better than disappointment or anger. “You sure? Broken ribs aren’t anything to brush off. I’ve seen a fella drown in his own blood because he punctured his lung.”

Just what sort of a life did Steve have? A hotel worker who saw people die? Things don’t quite add up and trying to think about everything is making Tony’s head hurt. He massages his forehead, squeezing his eyes shut, and oh, just falling asleep would be so nice. “I promise you, no broken ribs, no punctured lungs. Just some wicked bruising. I’ll be fine.”

Silence stretches out for a second. Without opening his eyes, Tony knows Steve is watching him critically, like he’s waiting for him to suddenly keel over and die. “I’ll be fine as soon as I can get out of here.”

Steve makes some sort of choked off noise in the back of his throat. “Oh, right. There’s a generator in the basement. I’ll go see if I can get that going. You can just wait here. If you want. Or, you can come with me.”

Tony waves his hand in the direction of where Steve was last time he looked. “I’ll just wait here. This couch is comfy. Though cold. You mentioned something about a blanket?”

“Uh, yeah, sorry. I’ll go grab that too.” Steve sounds embarrassed, and then his footsteps start retreating.

Tony can’t get his eyes to open though, can’t find the energy to look to see where Steve went. He just wants to curl up and go to sleep and hopefully wake up unscathed and at Rhodey’s and discover that this whole thing was some bizarre, sleep-deprived dream.

He hears Steve come back into the room, feels a blanket spread out over him. Logically he knows he should get rid of his wet clothes, or at least the damp jacket, but he’s finally warmed up inside it, and it smells worn and like some sort of old timey aftershave, which is enough to cover up the damp, musty leather scent. Besides logic takes effort, and Tony quite likes the way Steve’s jacket smells, so he just tugs the blanket up around his neck and wriggles back into the couch a bit more.

“You probably shouldn’t sleep.” Steve says softly, flickering the torch light over Tony’s face. “If you had a knock to the head.”

Tony scrunches up his eyes against the light, and flaps one of his hands dismissively, except it’s caught under the blanket and doesn’t have the desired effect. “I’ll be fine. Not going to sleep, just closing my eyes for a bit. Still got to make that phone call.”

“Okay.” Steve lets out a sigh. “I’ll go see if I can get this generator going.”

Tony listens to Steve’s footsteps retreating again. He feels like he should offer to help. If there’s something he knows about, it’s motors; but surely the generator shouldn’t take too long to fire up. Steve will be back upstairs before Tony even levers himself out of the couch, so he might as well wait where he is to make his phone call.

He must doze off, because one minute Tony’s listening for the sound of a generator or Steve returning, and the next he’s startled by the sound of someone clearing their throat. He blinks his eyes open, clearing his vision and pushing himself upright a bit more. The room is lighter than it was when he closed his eyes, but it isn’t the overhead lights that are responsible, instead there’s a lantern, an honest to God lantern, swinging in his field of vision. He’s so caught up in staring at the lantern, smoky glass and all, that it takes Tony far too long to notice the man holding it.

The lantern casts the man’s face in an eerie light. For a moment, he looks almost skeletal, sunken eyes and sharp cheekbones, grim, lipless mouth, then he tilts his head slightly and while he looks more human, Tony doesn’t think it’s much of an improvement.

“Well, well, well, what have we here?” His voice has a certain European harshness to it, German, maybe. It matches his stern features perfectly and all at once Tony feels like he’s in the wrong place, and just wrong.

“Hi,” Tony shoves the blanket off of him, scrabbling to stand up, because he feels too small and too chastised and he needs to get upright. “Name’s Tony. I, uh, I had a car accident, ran off the road, hit something, totalled the car. Anyway, this guy, Steve, he brought me here to use the phone, so I could call for help.”

The man stares at him, unimpressed, like Tony’s something horrible that he stepped in. “I suppose you’re the one responsible for the blackout then. Took out one of our power poles with your automobile, no doubt. We have an old switchboard. The phone won’t work without electricity.”

Tony shoves his hands in the pockets of Steve’s jacket, clenching his fingers until his fingernails press into his palms. “Steve did say as much. He’s trying to get the generator going.”

The man sneers. “That boy is useless. If you plan to use that phone any time soon, to call for help—” he says the word help like it’s something disgusting, “—you will probably be better off starting it yourself.”

Tony feels his hackles rise. The man is talking about the same Steve who broke the back window of his car and crawled in there to cut him out of his seatbelt. That Steve is anything but useless. “You know what, I think I will go down into your basement and fix your generator. And I’ll do it, not because I think Steve can’t, but because I know his company is going to be so much better than anything you have on offer.”

And there goes any future offer for help or invitations to stay. But Tony’s burnt enough bridges over the years that he knows which ones to rebuild and which ones to throw petrol on to see them burn brighter.

He’s not entirely sure where Steve went, but he takes a stab at the door behind the front desk, well aware that the man is watching him as he leaves. As soon as he steps through the door the dark envelops him. It’s colder too, and when he gets the torch app on his phone working, a narrow, steep set of concrete stairs greet him, littered with old boxes and broken pieces of wood. He picks his way through the rubbish as he descends, deciding that the hotel owner obviously has no pride in his business if he lets it get into such a state.

Halfway down there is a small landing, a door on the right hand side; heavy and metal with at least four deadbolt mechanisms, each with a large, old fashioned keyhole in them. Whatever is in that room, Tony thinks, someone wants to keep it a secret.

There’s a dull thud from in front of him, and a muffled curse. Tony ignores the door and keeps going, it’s not like he has time to puzzle over a locked door right now anyway.

The end of the staircase opens up into another room. It’s larger, colder, with an obvious draft coming from the right side of the room. As Tony’s eyes adjust, he thinks he can see holes in the wall, or at least, he thinks he can pick out stars.

“Steve?” He calls out, lifting his phone high and casting the light around. There’s another door on the left wall, light coming from within, and after a moment, Steve pokes his head out of the doorway.

“Oh, hey. Tony. You okay?” Steve steps out of the door, looking a real treat. His shirt sleeves are rolled up to his elbows and the once spotless white now sports a couple of grease smudges. His hands are in a similar state.

“Yep, I’m fine.” Tony replies, sounding happier than he means to. Just being around Steve is making him feel better, despite the creepy hotel. He starts to pick his way across the room, stepping around even more rubbish and overflowing boxes. One whole corner of the room is full of rubbish, piled up and what looks like an assortment of broken furniture. “I did, however just meet the worlds best example of how not to be in the hospitality industry.”

Steve scowls, there’s no other word for it. “You just met the hotel manager?”

Nodding, Tony edges up alongside Steve, craning his neck to see behind him into the other room. In the light cast by Steve’s torch, which he left on the ground, Tony can pick out the hulking generator taking up most of the space in the room. He whistles, impressed by the size and age of the motor. “That’s a beast and a half, how old do you think it is?”

Steve turns around in the doorway, his chest and arms brushing against Tony as he tries to navigate the small space. “I’m not sure. I think it’s only new. Got put in a couple years ago I think, when the old manager was here. But I can’t seem to get it to work. There’s fuel and oil and the spark plugs are clean, but something isn’t working.”

Tony hums acknowledgement, mind already focussed on the generator. It looks a lot older than a few years

“It might be the fuel line?” Steve offers with all the confidence of someone who has no idea what they’re talking about.

Tony grins, because Steve is, quite frankly, adorable.

Turning so Steve gets the full force of his grin, Tony pats him on the shoulder, his hand lingering there for a little longer than necessary. “Lucky for you, and me, I’m somewhat of a mechanical genius.”

That in itself is a huge understatement, but Tony doesn’t like to brag.

Half an hour later and a trip back to the car to scavenge the toolbox that he keeps in the boot, Tony thinks he’s finally managed to get the generator in working order. Steve hovers over his shoulder holding the torch for him the whole time he’s working, passing Tony tools as he needs them.

Stepping back, Tony bumps against Steve’s chest as he does. He leans forward to press the start button and the generator growls into life. “Ta dah! We have a working generator.”

Steve settles one hand on Tony’s shoulder and squeezes. “You’re a genius. I’d still be here scratching my head and having no idea what to do.”

He wants to lean into the touch, to slump back against Steve and just give into the fatigue. It doesn’t help that his head is still pounding. However, there’s things to do. Namely a best friend to call for help. Tony turns out of Steve’s touch, picking up his toolbox and heading out the door. There’s a fuse box right by the door, and opening it Tony studies the switches before finding one that’s labelled auxiliary input and flicks it on. The light overhead blinks into dim existence, the generator dropping to a lower growl as the hotel starts to draw power from it.

“Now, I do believe I have a date with a telephone and a ride out of here.” Tony looks over his shoulder, throwing a grin at Steve, only to feel it freeze in his face.

For a moment, Steve looks positively stricken, face pale and eyes impossibly sad, before he turns away from Tony and busies himself fussing around with the jerry cans he’d filled the generator with earlier. “Well, guess you’d better go make that phone call.”

Tony hesitates. He wants to stay, to ask Steve if he’s okay. To find out why Steve looked so sad at the prospect of him leaving. To ask Steve to come with him when Rhodey gets there to pick him up. It sounds crazy as soon as he thinks it. He barely knows Steve, why would Steve ever agree to leave with him? Tony squashes down all the words he can feel simmering in his throat, because he can’t say them, he’ll look crazy is he does. Instead, he turns and heads out the door.

The other room is awash with light this time, and in between the debris and rubbish, across the other side of the room is an old rickety looking elevator. It makes Tony pause. It looks like it only goes down, but Tony had assumed they were already underground anyway. “Hey, Steve. Where does the elevator go?”

There no answer. Steve probably can’t hear him over the generator. Tony almost goes back to ask him again, but the phone upstairs is calling for his attention, so Tony files the question away for later and jogs back up the staircase to the hotel lobby, as quickly as his aching ribs will let him.

It’s empty when he gets there, the skeevy manager from before obviously deciding to slither back off the wherever he came from, much to Tony’s relief. He can do without the judgement, and he doubts his efforts at fixing the generator will be all that appreciated.

Making a beeline for the phone, Tony pulls up the contacts list on his mobile and finds Rhodey’s number. Picking up the handset, Tony puts it to his ear, relieved to hear a dial tone. The dial on the phone makes him grimace, because people developed buttons for a reason, but he drags the dial around to each number and lets it scroll back again, until he has Rhodey’s number dialled. He waits for it to ring, but the phone just gives a funny click before a voice comes across the line.

“I’m sorry, your call could not be connected, the number–”

Tony cuts it off by jamming his finger down on the cradle, ending the call. He flicks through his contacts until he finds Pepper’s number and tries that, but again, he just gets the click and the falsely polite voice telling him the call can’t connect.

In a last ditch attempt, Tony dials 911. The phone clicks.

“I’m sorry, your call could not be connected—”

“Oh come on!” Tony snaps, about ready the throw the phone across the room. “How can emergency services not be connected?”

The voice on the phone is still talking. “—mber you have called from is no longer connected.”

Tony feels his chest grow cold. The line crackles and the voice distorts, words slurring and dragging out like an old stretched cassette tape.

“ _Please do not call again._ ”

Dropping the handset, Tony staggers to his feet. His vision swims, grey creeping in around the edges. It feels like a panic attack, but he can feel himself breathing normally, can feel the oxygen in his lungs, and other than the pounding in his head he feels fine. He wobbles on his feet as his vision greys out, blinking rapidly doing nothing to clear it.

Then something flashes through the grey A church bell, ringing, the clanging of it echoing in his ears. A graveyard full of head stones and lights. Somewhere that looks like it’s underground, some sort of sewer. A room, dark, dingy, a desk by a window and someone slumped over in the chair. A worn out looking town street. A church, paint peeling off the boards, fish swimming past, and eerie light cast down through the water.

All places that seem to be calling to him. The uncanny sense that he needs to go to these places.

Then, as fast as it came, the greyness clears and Tony’s left blinking at the hotel lobby. It looks different than before, but Tony can’t put his finger on exactly what.

“Tony?”

He spins around, head swimming. Steve’s standing there, by the front door. Tony doesn’t remember seeing him come up from the basement.

“You okay? Did you call your friend?”

Tony looks despairingly back at the phone. “I couldn’t get through.”

There’s footsteps, then Steve’s hand settles on his shoulder, turning him back around to squint at his face. Steve frowns, lips pressed into a thin line. “Maybe the line’s down in the storm. We can try again later.”

Tony nods mutely. Something really isn’t right, but he’s not sure he should tell Steve that he was just hallucinating, or what he heard over the phone. It’s all too weird, and at the moment, Steve’s being nice to him. That’ll all change if Steve thinks he’s crazy.

Steve squeezes his shoulder. “You look beat. I’ve got a room upstairs, it’s not much, but there’s a bed. Maybe you can lie down for a bit, and then in the morning you can try the phone again?” He smiles, small and reassuring. “You might feel better once you are warm and comfortable.”

Tony nods again, waiting for Steve to lead the way. He’s not surprised when Steve offers his hand again, just like he had in the forest; he doesn’t hesitate to take it, letting Steve lead him over to the stairs and up to the second floor. He follows Steve to room 106, noticing a door labelled 107 across the hall, but strangely not 101-105 anywhere. He doesn’t question it. If he starts questioning the strange things in this hotel, he’ll be here forever.

The room is small, but there’s a double bed in the centre, a chest of drawers along one wall, and a door leading to an en suite bathroom.

Steve shuts the door behind them. “Did you want a shower? I can find you something dry to wear to bed, if you like?”

Surprisingly, Tony does feel better after he’s showered and dressed in a set of pyjamas that Steve had fished out of the chest of drawers for him. Still, it’s not better enough to stop him from crawling straight into the bed, since Steve had offered it to him. The shower starts in the bathroom again, and Tony listens with his eyes shut, feeling sleep trying to tug him under, but he wants to talk to Steve again before he let it.

When he hears the shower shut off and the door open a minute later, Tony rolls over and forces his eyes open. Steve’s dressed in a white singlet and underwear, but sorting through the clothes he was wearing earlier like he plans to put them on again.

“You should sleep too.” Tony mumbles, words half muffled against the pillow. He doesn’t want to be alone, but he’s not sure how to say that, without sounding like he’s propositioning Steve.

Steve pauses, pants clutched in one hand. “I’ll be alright. And besides, you need the bed more than me.”

“Big enough for two.” Wow, Tony can’t believe he just said that. So much for not sounding like he’s propositioning the man.

Steve blushes, but he doesn’t look angry at all. He looks thoughtful for a moment, then like he’s really at war with himself internally over what he should do. Finally, Steve sighs and drops his trousers back onto the floor. Tony thinks he hears Steve mutter under his breath, “It won’t be any different than when you were in the army.” Before he says much louder, “I probably really shouldn’t leave you alone, not after the wreck you had.”

Tony smiles into the pillow as the light flicks off and he feels the mattress dip as Steve crawls into the bed too.

“Is this okay?” Steve whispers once he’s settled.

“‘Sfine.” Tony replies, resisting the urge to roll over and snuggle up to Steve and cling like an octopus.

He wakes during the night, not fully conscious, but enough to realise he’s pressed against Steve’s side, face buried against his neck, and one of Steve’s arms looped around his waist. He feels unbelievably safe, which in itself is ridiculous, but he doesn’t analyse it, he just goes back to sleep.

///

When Tony wakes again, the room is filled with a soft light, and a glance at his phone tells him that it’s just after seven in the morning. When he sits up, he notices that he’s alone, the other side of the bed is empty and Steve’s clothes are gone from the floor. A bad feeling settles in his stomach; Steve’s gone and Tony half worried that he’s hallucinated the whole thing.

He clambers out the bed, finding the clothes he took off the night before and gets dressed again. Steve’s jacket is still there, with the rest of his clothes, and he only hesitates a moment before shrugging into it. Turning towards the door, Tony rubs sleep out of his eyes and wonders what his chance of finding coffee in this weird place is.

He stumbles a bit on the way to the door, brain not entirely online again yet, and it takes him several attempts of trying to realise that the door won’t open. Rattling the door knob, Tony tries harder to get it to turn. It won’t budge. He kicks the door, knowing full well that he’s not putting enough force into it to actually achieve anything other than hurting his toes. Then he stops, leaning against the door and continuing to jiggle the door knob, trying to think of what else he can do in order to get out. His mind feels foggy though and he can’t think straight but he’s not sure if it’s from the knock he took to head in the car, or if he’s not awake yet.

There’s footsteps approaching the door from the outside, then the handle rattles on the other side of the door, but the door still doesn’t open. “Tony?”

 _Steve_.

Tony had wondered where Steve had disappeared to. He’d thought, for a moment, that maybe Steve had left and locked him in, but now Steve is trying to door and finding it unexpectedly locked as well.

“Tony, are you in there?” Steve sounds worried.

“Steve.” Tony replies, feeling relief catch the words in his throat. He’s not alone. Steve’s there, Steve’s trying to get back in to the room so Tony isn’t alone. “I think someone locked the door.”

“Tony? Tony, open the door?” Steve sounds panicked, voice getting more urgent. “Tony? Tony, please, open the door.”

“Steve?” Tony tries again, forcing the words to come out louder, something itching the back of his mind telling him that Steve can’t hear him. “Steve, I can’t get the door open.”

Sudden silence deafens him. He feels like his ears are blocked, full of water, and he can’t hear anything other than the thudding of his pulse inside his head. He can’t hear Steve outside the door, can’t hear his own desperate attempts to rattle the door handle or the way he’s kicking the door, even though he can feel the pain shooting through his foot. His vision swims, grey and static and then images flash before his eyes. A man slumped in a chair, head tipped back, hands around his throat. A chessboard with scattered pieces, the white king toppled in the middle of the board, the black queen standing in the square next to him, and a lone black pawn beside her. The church bell again, ringing and echoing in his head.

Then it’s gone, his vision is clear, the room looks different from before, darker, older, and where before there was a faint smell of soap, shampoo and aftershave, now there’s only a strong smell of mildew and stale air. It’s quiet. There’s no sound from outside the door. Nothing at all. Tony tries the door handle again, but it still doesn’t give.

“Steve?” Tony tries, leaning heavily against the door, unable to shake the overwhelming sense of being entirely alone. There’s no answer. Sucking in a deep breath, Tony pushes himself off the door. “Okay, Stark, pull it together. First step, get the door open, then find Steve, and then get the hell out of Dodge.”

Talking to himself doesn’t alleviate the loneliness, not entirely. It does make him feel a little more proactive; enough that he turns away from the door and scans the room. It looks different, older, with paint peeling off the walls and stains that look like water marks. The bedspread is tatty, moth eaten and worn through entirely in places so the wadding is showing. The wallpaper torn and peeling, the glass in the window turned opaque with grime and impossible to see through. Tony closes his eyes, presses his fingers against his eyelids until brown and green pixels dance through the dark. He drops his hand away, opening his eyes and blinking until his vision is clear. Nothing has changed. The room still smells damp and stale, still looks old and decrepit. He’s not sure how he missed it the night before. How he had managed to stagger into the room, shower and sleep there, all the while thinking it was new and clean. He’s not sure how he missed the smell. Cautiously he presses his nose against the collar of Steve’s leather jacket, half expecting it to smell old and musty as well, but it still smells like warm leather and aftershave.

Like Steve.

Steve, who is no longer talking to him on the other side of the door, Tony reminds himself, pulling his nose away from the leather and going back to looking around the room. Unfortunately, he doesn’t see his toolbox anywhere, and vaguely remembers leaving it down in the generator room. Cursing under his breathe, Tony does a quick scout around the room, though there isn’t much in the way of things to search. The chest of drawers reveals nothing but Steve’s clothes and one drawer that seems entirely dedicated to pencils and a suspiciously clear space that looks like it might have fit a stack of paper or a book. There’s a small table beside the bed, and when Tony opens the single drawer in that is empty but for a single sepia toned photograph.

Tony picks it up carefully, the edges are soft, like it’s been handled a lot, and there are smudged fingerprints on the surface of the photo in the top right and bottom left corners. Steve grins up at him from the photo, alongside another man, arm slung over his shoulders, dark hair and a smile twice as wide as Steve’s. They’re both dressed in military uniform, something vastly different from anything Tony has seen recently, something vintage. Maybe it isn’t Steve, a grandfather, perhaps, Tony isn’t sure. It’ll have to be something he asks Steve about later, if he remembers. Setting the photo carefully back down in the drawer and sliding it shut, Tony moves on to the bathroom, rifling through the medicine cabinet and under the sink. He tries to ignore the damp septic smell that permeates the room and the mould that is growing in places that he is sure it wasn’t growing the night before when he was in there. This time, at least, the search is fruitful, he manages to find a screwdriver in the back of the cupboard under the sink, which he holds triumphantly as he heads back to the bedroom and makes a beeline for the door.

Kneeling down in front of the door, so he’s eye level with the door handle and lock, Tony squints at it, as he removes the screws from the plate covering the lock mechanism. He has to jimmy the doorknob off in order the remove the plate, but eventually he finds himself having a staring competition with the tumblers of the lock mechanism itself. It doesn’t take long to disassemble the whole thing, carefully making a pile of all the parts in case Steve wanted him to put it all back together later on. Though, thinking about it, Tony is sure he’ll put the lock back together anyway, even if only to have some sort of barrier between him and the creepy hotel manager.

When the door finally gives, Tony lets out a whoop of triumph, dropping back onto him bum as he pulls the door inwards. “Take that, Pep, it doesn’t need to have a circuit board for me to be able to beat it. I can do analogue!”

He scrambles back up onto his knees, swinging the door open further only to freeze just as he stuffs the screwdriver in his back pocket. There’s someone out in the hallway, just outside the door, and even without taking the time to take a proper look, Tony knows it isn’t Steve. The person is a lot smaller, both shorter and slighter, and as they straighten up from where they’d bent to pick something up off the floor, Tony notices that the person is female, elegantly dressed and absolutely stunning. Her hair is a beautiful deep red, flecked in places by silver, features sharp under a layer of make-up. Briefly, before he can squash the thought down, Tony is reminded of his mother, her beauty and elegance that never faded with age, and then never faded behind glass photo frames.

He squashes away the memories and presses a smile onto his face even as he kneels on the floor. He notices the piece of paper in the lady’s hand, and the way she narrows her eyes slightly as she studies him. “Hi.”

She squints at him, then tilts her head to one side. “You’re not Steve.”

As far as a greeting goes, Tony feels it’s a little on the unfriendly side, but it is a lot better than what he got from the hotel manager. It does, also remind him that Steve isn’t anywhere in sight, despite it not being that long since he heard him the other side of the door. He feels his smile falter a little, but doesn’t let it slip. He’s used to dealing with unpleasant situations and pretending to love them. “Um, no, I’m decidedly not Steve. I am, however, looking for him, if you happen to know where he is?”

The lady studies him for a moment longer before holding out the piece of paper so Tony can see that there is something written on it. The penmanship is beautiful, looped and perfect, despite being written in graphite and the piece of paper looks like it was torn from a sketch book. “It would seem that he left you a note, along with breakfast.”

Tony reaches out for the piece of paper, fingers closing around it even as he glances down at the floor off to the right side of the door, noticing the tray placed there with a covered plate and a pot of coffee. He feels his smile twitch to more genuine. It at least explains why Steve wasn’t there when he woke up, even if it doesn’t tell him why the door was locked or where Steve is now. He glances back at the note in his hand.

_Tony, I couldn’t get the door open and you aren’t responding, I’m going to try and find the master keys, because all I can think is that you’re unconscious and need help. If you wake up and find this, come and find me at the old shed on the way back to your car. Be careful. Yours, Steve._

He should go find Steve, as soon as possible, so he doesn’t have to keep worrying. Pushing himself to his feet, Tony looks mournfully at the tray of food and coffee, which smells so inviting, but he’s not sure if he should touch it or not. If there is one thing that Spirited Away taught him, it was not to eat food while in a place that isn’t part of the real world, and he’s yet to decide if this is some sort of very painful dream, or another reality, but it really isn’t worth the risk.

The lady is still standing there, studying him carefully, one eyebrow carefully arched when Tony bypasses the tray of food entirely. “So I guess you’re the one who crashed their automobile last night? It was quite the frightful storm out there, it’s lucky you weren’t hurt.”

Tony forces a grin. “My infamy proceeds me, I see. I’m pretty sure I made an enemy of the manager, somehow, despite the fact that I fixed his generator.”

She smiles back, but it is far from kind or warm. “Don’t mind Jonah, he doesn’t like anyone.”

Tightening his fingers around the note, Tony takes a short step towards the stares. “I really should go find Steve.”

Her eyes soften at the mention of Steve, a touch of warmth creeping into the edges of her smile. “Yes, you really should. He is quite the worrier, that boy. Always trying to save everyone, dear thing.”

It seems like an odd turn of phrase, but it isn’t even close to the weirdest thing that Tony has encountered so far. He carefully folds the note and slips it into the pocket of Steve’s jacket. “I think he saved me last night, I’m not sure I ever would have gotten out of my car if it wasn’t for him.”

The lady arches an eyebrow again, interest flickering in her eyes. “If you ever get the time, I would very much like to hear your story. I do love stories. There are so many stories I could tell you too, about this place, the town wasn’t always like this, as I’m sure you’ve guessed. I have so many stories from before the accident. And so many stories about the people.” She pauses, studying him carefully. “About Steve.”

Tony frowns, starting to feel a little uncomfortable by the level of scrutiny she’s giving him, and the way she’s speaking, even if his interest is piqued and he really does want to know more about the strange hotel and the town. “Sure. Okay. Maybe later. I’m sorry, but I really should go find Steve.”

“Yes, you should.” She turns then, without even waiting for a response, and slips through the door on the opposite side of the hall, closing it behind her so that Tony is left staring at the brass 107 that adorns it, looking less shiny than it had the night before.

“Okay then.” Tony huffs out under his breath, carefully pulling the door shut behind him, despite the fact that there is no way to keep it closed. He glances mournfully at the coffee once more, resolutely ignores the way that his stomach rumbles and heads for the stairs.

Everything about the hotel seems a little off, and little different from the night before, but Tony doesn’t take the time to catalogue differences, just wanting to get outside because the place is starting to give him the creeps and the unsettling encounter with Steve’s neighbour isn’t really helping at all. When he gets outside, Tony notices that the rain from the night before has let up but the sky is still hideously overcast, with clouds that look like they’re threatening to burst at any moment. He tugs Steve’s jacket a little tighter around his shoulders and sets off down the path that Steve had lead him along several times the night before. It’s even darker once he gets inside the cover of the trees, though Tony keeps picking his way along the path, trying to ignore sounds and flickers of movement amongst the trees either side of the path.

Finally the shadow of the old shed appears around a bend in the path, and Tony picks up his pace when he sees a light coming from inside and can hear the sound of something moving around inside. “Steve?” He calls out, hoping against hope that it is Steve inside.

There’s a loud thump, then a muffled voice, and suddenly Steve appears in the open doorway of the shed, looking pale and drawn, forehead creased with worry. He stands there, frozen, for a moment, then he drops something from his right hand that clatters against the wooden floor and darts out of the doorway and down the path towards Tony, skidding to a rough stop in front of him, both hands coming up and hovering awkwardly for a few seconds until they settle on Tony’s shoulders. The moment he touches him, Tony can see Steve’s whole posture slump as it loses some of its tension, Steve’s fingers grip tight, borderline painfully.

“Oh, Tony. Thank Christ. I was so worried. I couldn’t get the door open, and you weren’t responding to me. I thought. I thought.” He swallows loudly enough that Tony can hear it as he watches Steve’s jaw clamp shut and his Adam’s Apple bob in his throat. Steve doesn’t say anything else, just stares down at Tony like he’s too afraid to even blink, just in case Tony disappears.

Tony reaches up a hand carefully, brushes his fingers against Steve’s elbow and offers him what he hopes is a reassuring smile. “Hey, it’s okay. I’m okay. I think the door lock broke or something. I had to pull the whole thing apart, I’m afraid. So, sorry about that, big guy, your room is currently un-lockable. In fact, the door won’t even stay closed, I didn’t take the time to fix it again, I thought I’d better come and find you. You’re neighbour said you worry too much, and I can see she’s right about that.”

Steve’s cheeks and ears start to take on a pink tinge, which Tony decides is so much better than the deathly pale colour he was before. If all he has to do to calm Steve down is keep talking, he thinks he can manage that. He doesn’t get a chance to think of what to say next, however, all his words disappearing when Steve suddenly jerks him in closer, wrapping his arms around Tony’s shoulders and pulling him against his chest. It takes him an embarrassing long time to realise that Steve’s hugging him, holding him close and hunching over until his face it pressed against the side of Tony’s neck.

Not sure what else to do, Tony pats him awkwardly on the back. “Hey, hey, it’s okay.”

Steve lets out a shuddery breath against his neck before his arms slowly loosen and he takes a step back. He blinks down at Tony a couple times then takes another stilted step backwards, the pink on his cheeks and ears starting to creep down his throat as he rubs at the back of his neck, eyes flickering away from Tony only to dart back every few seconds. “So, you met Ms Natasha then?”

Tony can only assume that Ms Natasha is the name of the lady he met outside Steve’s room. He gives Steve a smile that he hopes will show that he’s not being all that serious. “She’s quite intense.”

Steve huffs out a laugh, a smile stretching across his face as he drops his hand down from his neck, and then after a moment tucks both his hands in his pockets. “She’s not all that bad, despite the way she tries to come across. She’s a good person.” His smile falters and slips off his face as he frowns, looking away from Tony, over his shoulder back in the direction of the hotel. “I think she forgets that sometimes.”

Tony wants to ask, he really does, wants to find out what Steve means, but it really doesn’t feel like his place at all. The whole place feels like it’s keeping secrets from him, which has him set on edge in a way that he doesn’t like. A feeling that doesn’t seem nearly as suffocating while he’s with Steve, which in itself doesn’t make much sense, he knows, because he hardly even knows Steve. He just knows that Steve saved him, and is still obviously worried about him, and that’s more than he can say for a lot of people he knows. “I got the feeling that she might be lonely, she seemed pretty keen to have me talk to her later on.”

Steve’s frown deepens, and he hunches his shoulders over a bit. “I don’t talk to her as much as I should. She lost all the people she cared about.”

“In the flood?” Tony can’t help but ask, wanting to bite back the words even as they leave his mouth. He doesn’t even know when the flood happened, if it would have been in Natasha’s lifetime or not.

Steve scrunches his face up like he’s in pain, nearly curling in on himself as he hunches more. “No, before that. She visits the cemetery almost every day to go to his grave. Bucky, I mean, he was her sweetheart.”

There’s something so pained about Steve’s voice, something so sad that Tony can’t stop himself from reaching out and gripping his arm. He wants to pull Steve into a hug, but Steve’s so much bigger than him he’s sure it’ll just be awkward, and he was never the best at giving comfort. Instead he just squeezes Steve’s biceps and tries to catch his eye.

Blinking rapidly, Steve glances back at Tony and offers him a stiff smile. “Bucky was a good fella, he was my best friend. It’s something that Natasha and I have in common, I guess. We both miss him.”

At a complete loss, all Tony can do is wait, letting Steve lean heavy against his hand, waiting for him to decide if he wants to keep talking or not. Grief hit people in different ways, Tony doesn’t think that Steve was the type to crawl into a bottle and try and drown his grief, but he also doesn’t think that he was the sort to really want to talk about it.

The moment crawls on until Steve suddenly straightens up and steps back, looking away from Tony and back towards the shed, rubbing a hand over the back of his neck again. It doesn’t cover up the fact that his skin has gone bright red again. “How are you feeling, anyway? I should have asked that first.”

“I’m fine, a little stiff and sore, but nothing too bad.” Tony replies, trying to ease the tension in the air between them, letting Steve change the subject easily. “I wasn’t unconscious this morning, like you worried, I did even hear you calling out to me, I’m surprised you didn’t hear me calling back that I couldn’t get the door open.”

Steve’s head jerks around, frown pressed into his features. “You where trying to talk back?”

Shrugging, Tony slips his hands into the pockets of Steve’s jacket and pulls it tighter around him. “Uhuh, I was pretty much shouting. Thought you would have heard me for sure.”

Face growing pale, Steve glances around quickly, like he’s expecting there to be other people nearby, spying on them, despite there only being two other people that Tony knows about. “I didn’t hear you. I couldn’t hear you.” He glances around again, back at the shed, staring to the right of it. “Do you feel up for going for a bit of a walk?”

Shuffling closer to Steve, Tony makes out a path that goes past the shed that he hadn’t noticed the night before. It’s a different path than the one that leads back to his car, or the one to the hotel, winding back between the trees and disappearing into a darkness that is a lot thicker than anywhere else in the forest. “That all depends on where and why. I know my fairy tales, I don’t exactly fancy meeting a big bad wolf in there pretending to be my grandma.”

Steve gives him a baffled, amused look for a moment before his face slips back into seriousness. “There’s a path back there, it’ll bring you out on the rise before the old town, and from there there’s another path that leads back to the road. It might be your best chance of getting out of here, since the phone still isn’t working. I checked again this morning.”

Thinking about phones, Tony pulls his hand out of the jacket pocket and carefully pats his jeans pockets until he locates his mobile, fishing it out of his pocket and illuminating the screen. The small No Service in the corner still glares at him accusingly. All he needs is one measly little bar of signal and then he could send Rhodey a message and get his friend to come and pick him up. It really doesn’t seem too much to ask for, though the universe obviously begs to differ. Not even looking up from glaring at his phone, Tony asks the question he was evidentially too out of it to ask the night before. The very obviously first question he should have asked. “I don’t suppose the hotel has Wi-Fi?”

The question is met with silence that lasts long enough that he looks up to find Steve looking at him, frowning, head tilted to one side like and inquisitive puppy. “Why what?”

Smothering the urge to roll his eyes and ask what sort of backwards place he’s ended up in, Tony bites the inside of his cheek until the scathing words disappear. “Wireless?”

If anything, this just makes Steve look even more adorably perplexed, though there is a spark of something in his eyes, like he understands what Tony’s asking. “I’ve got a radio. In my room. It doesn’t work all that well. Most of the time it’s just static. But I don’t see how that’s going to help at all?”

It takes a moment for Tony to catch up with what Steve’s saying, then it all clicks and all he can do is shake his head so rapidly it makes his vision swim and flap one hand in front of Steve’s face to try and get him to stop talking. “No, not a wireless. Wireless. Wi-Fi. Internet? Hell, I’ll give my entire fortune and my left leg for dial-up right now. If it’s more modern than Morse Code, I’d like access to it right now.”

Steve just keeps frowning, even as he reaches a hand out and catches hold of Tony’s wrist, hunching over slightly so he’s looking Tony right in the eye, studying his face with a look of concern. “Are you feeling okay? You’re rambling and saying a lot of things that don’t make sense.”

“You’re face doesn’t make sense.” Tony snaps back, pulling away from Steve’s grasp and just stopping himself short of poking his tongue out. There’s only so much childish behaviour that he can get away with, before Steve decides to stop helping him.

Steve’s jaw tenses and he looks skywards, breathing with such deliberate evenness that Tony can tell he’s pushed Steve to the edge of his patience. Rubbing a hand over his face, Steve drops his head forward and stares at the ground. “Okay, so I think, between the locked door, not hearing each other through it, and all the odd things that don’t line up, we can at least agree that something weird is going on here. The phone isn’t working, that little doodad of yours that you call a phone doesn’t seem to do a thing. And we’re fresh out of carrier pigeons, so.”

He can’t help it, Tony cracks a smile, ignoring Steve’s dig at his phone. “Was that sass I hear just now? And here I thought you were getting mad at me.”

Steve’s head jerks up, eyes wider than before, looking worried. “No, Tony. I’m sorry. It’s just. Everything is weird, and I feel like you aren’t safe here. You need to leave, as soon as possible. I never should have even let you stay the night, I should have made you leave yesterday, as soon as we discovered the phone wasn’t working. You need to leave. I’ve got to-”

The change of tone and the sudden urgency in Steve’s voice, coupled with the way his skin reverts back to the deathly pale colour it had been when Tony saw him the first time that morning, make the smile slip off of Tony’s face and he fights down a shiver. Something is wrong, Steve is staring off over his shoulder, back towards the hotel, looking spooked. A chill crawls down Tony’s spine, the sudden jolt of dread in his chest makes him want to bolt, to get away from there as fast as possible, every one of his senses telling him to go, go, go, not to linger, not to turn around, just start running and never stop. He can’t though, feels like he’s frozen in place, not just because Steve is standing there right in front of him, fear all over his face. He wants to make Steve finish his sentence, and yet, he doesn’t want to hear any more. Swallowing the lump of bile and fear in his throat, Tony reaches out slowly, until his fingers brush against the back of Steve’s hand. Without even looking, Steve’s hand jerks around to grab hold of Tony’s fingers squeezing impossibly tight, skin so cold that Tony nearly yelps and pulls away again, but he doesn’t, gritting his teeth instead and letting a shiver judder through him.

“Steven, there you are boy.”

The voice comes from behind Tony, and he feels another shiver, that has nothing to do with Steve’s cold skin, rattle up his spine. Only one encounter so far with the man and Tony had really hoped to put off ever having to talk to him again. He doesn’t turn to look at the hotel manager, keeping his focus on Steve, watching as his jaw clenches and he can hear Steve grind his teeth together.

“Mr Schmidt, what can I do for you?” Still pale, Steve’s face goes blank and his voice is flat, though his grip on Tony’s hand doesn’t slacken at all.

Tony edges slightly closer to Steve, angling himself so he can see the hotel manager, squeezing Steve’s fingers in what he hopes is a comforting manner, and not threatening broken bones. Steve doesn’t look at him, but he feels his body lean into his space a fraction more, an infinitesimal amount that he’s sure wouldn’t even be visible to the human eye. He’s half sure that he imagined the movement himself, except for the change of weight and pressure on his hand. From the corner of his eye he catches the hotel manager shift, eyes drawn to the movement in time to see the manager, Schmidt, narrow his eyes and sneer in disgust as his eyes flicker down to their hands.

“The generator needs refuelling, and the widow Pierce has some errands for you.” Schmidt finally says after a long moment of just staring at them, his lip curling and voice dripping with disdain.

It’s only the tightening of Steve’s grip on his hand that stops Tony from spitting out some smart reply, like the he knew how close Tony was to telling Schmidt to refuel his own generator. Looking back at Steve, Tony sees him shake his head, a minute movement, eyes still fixed on the hotel manager and face still blank.

“Of course, Mr Schmidt. I’ll get right to it.” There is no emotion in Steve’s voice at all as he speaks, though when he finally pulls his eyes away from Schmidt to look back at Tony, something akin to fear flashes behind his eyes before his jaw sets again and a steely resolves falls over his features. When he speaks again, his voice it low, barely a whisper, hurried and desperate. “Take the path back to the road, Tony. Don’t stay here, and don’t listen to a word that Schmidt says. You need to leave before it’s too late.”

 _Too late for what?_ Tony wants to ask, but even as he’s forming the words on his tongue, Steve’s pulling his hand out of Tony’s and starting back up the path to the hotel, not even looking over his shoulder until he’s several metres past Schmidt. He catches Tony’s eye again, face grim as he mouths the word “Go”. It might be the distance, but Tony thinks Steve looks sad when he turns and disappears around the bend in the path, leaving Tony standing in the slight clearing with the hotel manager looking at him like he’s something disgusting that he stepped in. He wants to say something cutting, something defensive before Schmidt can start in at him about whatever it is he doesn’t like. It was probably the way they were holding hands, Tony thinks, because that’s the sort of thing that bigots get all twitchy about.

Schmidt’s face evens out slightly, as much as it can, for someone who looks like their wearing an ill fitting mask. “Anthony, I’d strongly advise you not to put too much stock in the things that boy says. His mind is quite fantastical. He has a paranoia, a fear if you will, that has haunted him since the war. He didn’t come back quite right.”

Post Traumatic Stress might explain some of the odd behaviour, the disassociation with the modern world, the very distinct paranoia that Steve was showing a few minutes ago, but Tony wasn’t even going to pretend to be a psychologist. Even if it lined up with Steve’s comment about the army the night before, Tony wasn’t going to go jumping to conclusions, and even if Steve had paranoid delusions like Schmidt seemed to be implying, the man had been nothing but nice to him, had saved him, had looked after him, and Tony isn’t going to forget that any time soon.

He narrows his eyes, gritting his teeth as he plasters on his best media smile. “I’ll bear that in mind. Thank you.” He says with barely masked insincerity.

Schmidt glares a little harder and looks like he’s about to say something, but Tony really doesn’t want to hear it. They whole place is giving him the creeps, and he keeps thinking about the urgency in Steve’s voice when he told him to leave. It doesn’t seem like nearly enough to repay the man for his kindness, but he knows he should at least try making it to the highway. At least look at the trail and see if it looks like a possible to traverse by himself. He doesn’t like the idea of just leaving, but Steve told him to go. Maybe Steve didn’t want him there any more. Maybe there was something else going on entirely, he doesn’t know. What he does know is that he’s tired and sore and hungry and severely under-caffeinated, and he really just wants to go home.

Or, at least, somewhere familiar. He just wants to get to Rhodey’s. His friend is probably worried sick about him by now.

He decides the only way he’s going to get out of there without getting stuck with Schmidt’s general unpleasantness is to bail before he has a chance to say anything else. “As much as I’ve enjoyed your hospitality, I really must be going now. I have a road to find and a vehicle to flag down and anywhere else to be but here.”

Turning back towards the path Steve had pointed out before, Tony sucks in a breath and squares his shoulders, preparing himself to tackle the next obstacle, trying to ignore the gnawing feeling of guilt that is brewing at the idea of just abandoning Steve to this creepy place. But Steve told him to go. And, Tony reminded himself, it wasn’t like he couldn’t come back later, with Rhodey and a working car and ride into town like a knight on a white horse to rescue Steve. Who was very much not a damsel, and possibly only a little bit in distress if the last look he’d given Tony was anything to go by. Shaking the thought out of his head, he takes a step towards the path next to the tool shed, clutching his phone tight, ready to turn on the torch application if the need arose.

“You can’t leave.” Schmidt calls from behind him, words sending a chill down Tony’s spine.

He keeps the smile plastered in place when he glances over his shoulder, eyeing the hotel manager sceptically. “Just watch me. Pretty sure this isn’t Hotel California.”

He throws a peace sign up over his shoulder just for good measure, and very definitely doesn’t run away. It’s just a very brisk walk until he gets around the next bend and there is a thick layer of trees and undergrowth blocking Schmidt from sight. It’s then and only then that Tony lets out the full body shudder that he’s been trying to keep in check since Steve left. Nothing is right and it’s freaking him out. “Pull yourself together, Stark.” He mutters under his breathe, focusing on putting one foot in front of the other and he picks his way down the path, keeping an eye out for loose rocks and exposed tree roots. He really doesn’t think a tumble to the ground will do his aching ribs or head any favours.

Tony estimates he’s only been walking for a few minutes when the trees start to thin again and the path opens up to a clearing. In front of him the ground dips away, slanting down towards darker, blocky shapes looming out of the hazy grey light that permeates the whole area. Directly in front of him is a light post with several finger post direction signs pointing in different directions and a tumble down picket fence, that looks like it might have once meant to guard the edge of the hill. Approaching the sign post, Tony squints up at the signs, noticing the pain is faded and peeling and the wood is weathered with age. There are three signs, the one labelled _Hotel_ points back in the direction that he came, while another points towards the path leading down the hill and the blocky shapes, proudly proclaiming _Town_.

The last points off to his left, to a dark and overgrown path that disappears back in between the trees that continue further up the hill; with the paint entirely worn away, that all that is left to read is the slightly less faded timber where the word _Road_ used to be. Tony glances between the shadowy town in the distance and the dark path. Neither look particularly inviting, but only one is in anyway productive, since he got the feeling from the way Steve spoke that the town was entirely abandoned. Steeling himself, and flicking on the torch function on his phone, Tony starts up the path that promises it will lead him back to the road.

It starts off as an increase to the dull ache behind his eyes; the type of headache that he gets when he’s gone too long without coffee. Raising a hand to his forehead, Tony massages the bridge of his noes, trying to ease the pressure there; as he steps carefully around a damp, muddy section of the path. He stumbles suddenly, unsure what he’s tripped on, lights dance across his vision as it swims. Everything seems darker than before and as Tony staggers again he realises that his phone is no longer in his hand. He turns, glancing behind him, but he can’t see his phone on the ground behind him. His head spins, vision swimming and he stumbles again, pitching so far forward that he has to catch himself with his hands, feeling pain jar through his left wrist and up his arm.

Hissing through the pain, Tony pushes himself put up to his feet, tucking his left hand against his chest to try and support it. His head spins, vision blurring around the edges and he stumbles again. He reaches out to catch himself, but it’s not the ground that he sees rushing towards him. His vision goes grey, swimming and spinning, and there’s a high pitched whine that fills his ears. It ends suddenly, rolling over into the clang of a church bell. He sees it, swinging back and forth and ringing over and over. Then he’s staring up through the water as something drifts down through the blue towards him. The church bells keeps ringing.

///

Consciousness slowly creeps back in; the first thing Tony becomes aware of is the touch on face, the feel of fingers brushing through his hair against his forehead. The image of his mum invades his mind, her soft eyes looking at him with worry. There’s a murmur of words that he can’t focus on, an unfamiliar tune flitting through the air. It isn’t a song he knows, it certainly isn’t one that his mum ever sang to him, on the rare occasions when she would. As the words slowly start to filter through the haze and pain in his brain, Tony realises that they aren’t even in a language that he recognises. It isn’t English. It’s less musical than Italian, which was what his mum used to sing to him. Slavic, maybe Russian, but he can’t focus on the individual words well enough to recognise any of them.

Beyond the unfamiliar voice carrying an unfamiliar tune, Tony feels nauseous, the world spinning beyond his closed eyes. He’s warmer than before, and the air around him smells like something he knows but can’t quite place. Leather, sweat and aftershave. There’s another, new scent as well, something faintly floral and incredibly beautiful. It isn’t the same expensive perfume that his mum used to wear, but it is comforting in its own way.

Not as comforting as the scent of warm, worn leather though.

It takes Tony an impossible amount of effort to open his eyes. Everything is a blurry haze of vague colours until he manages to blink his vision clear. He’s back in Steve’s room, the room he’d woken up in that morning. The room he’d been trapped in that morning. The realisation makes him jerk, trying to sit up and dislodging the hand from his hair. The door is open though, the handle still missing and the lock housing empty. A quick scan of the room reveals that everything else looks exactly as it did the night before, which doesn’t seem quite right, but Tony can’t put this finger on why the room looking like it did the first time he saw it bugs him. The only difference is that instead of Steve being in the room, the lady he’d met that morning, Natasha, is perched on the edge of the bed, her body curved around so she can look down at him, and he suspects, run her fingers through his hair. She’s no longer singing and her face is carefully blank, although there is a sadness in her eyes that is similar to the sadness he caught sight of in Steve’s.

“You are okay.” It’s a statement, not a question, that Natasha poses to him, reaching for his shoulder and pressing gently down until he relents and lies back against the pillows.

“What happened?” Frowning, Tony tries to take stock of how he feels. His left wrist hurts, along with his right knee, and the ache in his ribs is more prominent than he remembers it being. His head feels like it’s splitting open at the temples and there’s an ache behind his eyes that tells him he’s gone far too long without coffee. On top of that, his stomach grumbles and growls and feels like it is trying to fold in on itself, and he’s not actually sure when the last time he ate was.

Natasha shrugs her shoulders delicately, reaching back up to brush hair back off of Tony’s forehead. “Steven asked me to watch over you. Said you are here, when you should have been gone.”

The memory surges back then. Going looking for Steve in the forest, the weird conversation he’d had with Schmidt. Steve’s insistence the he should leave. And the path that apparently hadn’t let him leave.

“I,” He swallows, licking his lips, bringing his right hand up to massage viciously at his temples. “I blacked out. I must have. How’d I get back here?”

Natasha shrugs again and looks away, her head turned like she’s looking out the hallway and across to her room. “That I do not know. Steven didn’t say.”

Tony tries to force the memory, searches for something that will explain how he got back here, but there’s nothing, just the path and then blank. He rubs harder at his temple, then at his eyes, pressing his fingers and thumb in hard enough against his eyelids that green and brown pixilated spots dance across the black of his vision.

Natasha snaps something sharp at him in Russian and her hands wrap around his wrist and tug his hand away; her skin is cool to the touch, smooth and soft. “You will hurt yourself, silly boy. You do not need to give Steven more to worry about.”

There’s a measure of guilt that rolls forward in his mind at the mention of Steve. He wishes that it was Steve there with him, which feels like a foolish notion, Tony knows, but it doesn’t change the inexplicable way that he feels. Carefully he opens his eyes and squints up at Natasha, trying to lessen the pain in his head. “He worries a lot.”

A look of immeasurable sadness flashes across Natasha’s face before she pulls her features back into order. “He thinks it is his job to protect everyone, like we cannot look after ourselves. He has not stopped worrying since the dam broke and the flood came.”

The flood; it’s something that keeps getting mentioned, something Tony is sure he’s seeing in the weird visions that he keeps having. It itches at his mind, like somehow it’s important, like it has something to do with everything weird that has been going on. The abandoned town and the valley still full of water are equal parts strange, but the fact that there are still people living in the hotel is what Tony has the most trouble understanding. He gets the impression the town has been abandoned for quite some time, and yet, they’re still here. There is still a horrifically named hotel being run and still guests staying there.

“What is this flood that everyone keeps mentioning?” He hears himself asking, even as his eyes drift shut again and he sinks back into the bed.

Natasha is quiet for a long moment, though her fingers keep stroking through Tony’s hair. “This used to be a beautiful town. I was someone important once, had the world at my feet. And then the flood came and took all of that away. It was terrible. They told us to evacuate. So many people left the town and never came back again. I can’t even remember when it happened.” She lifts her other hand to rub at her forehead, glancing away. “My memory isn’t what it used to be.”

Squinting his eyes open again, Tony tries to focus on her words and make sense of them. He hasn’t seen anything yet that indicates when the flood happened, but surely if it had happened recently he would have heard something about it. “Why didn’t you leave?”

Natasha gives him a small, sad smile. “When the orders came to evacuate, I moved here to the hotel. I couldn’t leave entirely. I couldn’t leave him behind.”

“Steve?” Tony asks, even though he thinks he doesn’t have to. He can’t imagine Natasha wanting to stay for Schmidt’s sake.

The smile slips into just sadness, and Natasha carefully withdraws her hand from Tony’s hair, folding her hands neatly in her lap and looking towards the window. “James. Sweet boy that he was. He’s buried in the cemetery here.”

He wonders if James is the same person as the Bucky who Steve was talking about earlier. The man that they both missed. Natasha’s sweetheart. But then, to call her sweetheart a sweet boy, strikes Tony as a little odd, but who is he to question it. Except, he does want to ask questions, though Natasha seems to have withdrawn and shut off the conversation, so he knows that it isn’t the sort of thing that he can ask her. Maybe he can bring it up with Steve later, when he catches up with him. Which reminds him that he really should try and find Steve. It seems that no matter what, he keeps coming back to Steve.

Natasha stands suddenly, smoothing her hands over her dress and coat and crosses the room to the chest of drawers against the other wall. She picks something up from the top, and when she turns to face Tony again, he sees that it is a tray of food, similar to the one Steve had left outside the door.

There’s a fake smile spread across her lips, the sadness still deep in her eyes. “Steven said you should eat.”

Tony resolutely tries to ignore the way his stomach growls and grumbles, aching in a way that reminds him just how hungry he is. He can’t eat, there is something in the back of his mind that tells him it’s a bad idea. Like dreaming about going to the toilet, or jumping off a building and not waking up before you hit the ground. “I’m really not all that hungry.” He lies through his teeth, tearing his eyes away from the coffee pot on the tray and trying to breathing only through his mouth, because the scent is so enticing.

Natasha frowns at him, but doesn’t say anything as he pushes back the blankets and rolls out of bed. He’s still wearing most of his clothes from before, though his shoes are beside the bed waiting for him, and Steve’s jacket is hanging on the hook behind the door. He feels a little stiff and raw in places from sleeping in jeans, but he knows that that will go away as he moves around more. Pulling his shoes on, Tony ducks past Natasha to grab Steve’s jacket and shrugs his way into it, trying not to press his nose into the collar. Despite the fact that it’s been hanging up for an undetermined amount of time, the leather feels warm and still smells strongly of Steve.

“I really should go find Steve.” He says, feeling like it’s unnecessary, but Natasha still hasn’t said anything, and Tony hates awkward silences. “Should say goodbye at least before I try leaving again.”

Natasha is still standing there with the tray of food and coffee in her hands, her face blank but her eyes holding something that Tony can’t quite place. “He worries a lot.”

Frowning slightly, Tony fidgets, picking up the screw driver he’d left behind before twirling it around in his hand before tucking it in his back pocket. “You said that already.”

Natasha’s face remains blank, eyes dropping towards the tray in her hands and then her brow furrows. “He worries about everyone. Thinks he needs to save us all.”

She’d said it before, Tony remembers, not the exact same words, but the same sentiment. It makes something cold settle in his chest. Everything about this place and the people in it is unnerving in a way he can’t quite pinpoint. He doesn’t want to ask, but he feels the words creeping out of his throat even as he dreads the answer. “Save us from what?”

Silence fills the room, stretching out and wrapping around Tony like it wants to strangle him. He swallows, rubs at his throat with one hand while he stuffs the other into the pocket of Steve’s jacket, crinkling paper as he does.

Natasha keeps staring at the tray, then, after a moment, shakes her head, lifting her gaze to meet Tony’s and gives him a smile that doesn’t reach her eyes. “You should eat, dear boy.”

Rattled, Tony shakes his head, feeling like he’s nerves have been rubbed raw as a shiver works its way down his spine. “No thanks, I’m not hungry. I should go find Steve.”

He practically bolts out of the room, much as he loathes to admit it, Natasha unnerved him. As if the creepy town and its creepy hotel and the creepy manager weren’t bad enough. He doesn’t need Steve’s neighbour added to that list. It doesn’t help that he thinks he hears Natasha repeat the words _he worries a lot_ once more as he leaves the room. He lets himself shudder again, when he’s out of sight, before he clenches his jaw and tells himself firmly that he needs to stop being silly and start being the genius engineer that he is, and find a way out of this place. He tries to think back to the previous day and the path to the road. At least, he think it was the previous day. It had been daytime, he’s sure of that much, not sure if he ever made note of the actual time, however, he doesn’t know how long he was out of it. Thinking of that, he pats down his pockets for his phone, front left, right, then back left and right, only to come up empty. Desperately he stuffs his hands in the jacket pockets, but it’s not there either. He pats down his jeans’ pockets again, but there is definitely nothing in them.

“Fuck.” Spitting the word out, Tony clenches his hands around his hair and tugs until that pain replaces the persistent ache inside his head. “Shit. Son of a bitch!”

Spitting profanities half way down the hotel stairs doesn’t exactly make him feel better, nor does it make his phone suddenly appear in front of him. He must have dropped it on the path when he blacked out. Maybe Steve picked it up when he found him. Spinning around, Tony bounds back up the stairs two at a time and bursts back into Steve’s room. He stumbles to a stop when he notices that the room is empty. Natasha is no longer there, neither in the tray of food, and somehow, miraculously the bed is made again. Frowning, Tony tries to add up the seconds in his head since he left the room, but it certainly doesn’t seem like enough time, even taking into account that Natasha only lives across the hall from Steve’s room. He puts the thought aside in order to search the room for his phone, but it’s fruitless. He pauses as he rifles through the draw of the bedside table, fingers brushing against the edge of the photo he’d seen there before. The photo of two soldiers grinning up at him. There’s something off, something different from before. The soldier who looks to be a dead ringer for Steve has a smudge across his image, a slight ripple and warp, like someone dripped water on his image. It makes him feel a little sad and guilty, to see that the photo that Steve obviously treasured had been damaged. He just really hopes it wasn’t him.

Phone still missing, Tony shuts the drawer and heads out of the room again, taking the stairs two at a time, letting gravity and inertia do most of the work to get him to the bottom. The hotel lobby is empty, a fact that Tony is eternally grateful for, since he really doesn’t feel he could deal with the creepy manager right at this moment. He starts towards the front door when something glints under the light in the fish tank and catches his eye. Closer inspection reveals that it’s a key, half buried in the pebbles at the bottom of the tank. It seems like a really odd place for a key to have been dropped, since there is a glass lid over the tank, which can only mean that it was hidden there deliberately. It reminds him of the door in the stairwell behind the reception desk. The door with many locks. Without thinking twice about it, Tony shrugs one arm out of Steve’s jacket and pushes his shirt sleeve up past his elbow, moving the glass cover to one side and plunges his hand into the water. It’s colder than he would have thought would be healthy for pet fish, but then again, he hasn’t seen anything inhabiting the tank. Just as his fingers close around the key, Tony thinks he sees a flicker of movement, something darting towards him through the water, and he jerks back, hand flinging water all over the place as he pulls it from the fish tank.

Staggering back a couple of steps, Tony eyes the tank, but nothing moves. The water inside the tank looks murkier than before, like he’d stirred up sediment from the bottom when he’d grabbed the key, but other than a few fake pieces of coral and a miniature castle ruin, it is empty. Not a fish in sight, which strikes Tony as odd, and as a waste of water and electricity to keep a tank functioning and clean if there was nothing living in it. Stepping further away from the tank, Tony shakes water off his hand and glances down at the key. It’s more ornate than he would have expected, which makes him doubt that it will actually fit one of the locks in the door.

“Only one way to find out.” He mutters under his breath, pulling his sleeve back down over his wet forearm and pulling Steve’s jacket back on properly. Glancing around the lobby again to make sure Schmidt hasn’t crept up on him while his back was turned, Tony hurries over to the door behind the counter, slipping into the stairwell and going down the first flight to the landing. The door is right there, with its multitude of locks, none of which look like they match the key in design. Starting at the top, Tony tries all the locks that look like they might remotely fit the key, and he’s on the second from the bottom when the key slides in smoothly and he manages to turn it, hearing the thunk as the lock tumbler is thrown over. One out of four, ain’t bad, Tony thinks, carefully turning the key back and slipping it from the lock. There’s no point in raising suspicion after all.

Heading back into the lobby, he slips the key into the pocket inside Steve’s jacket, stitched into the lining. It’s a snug enough fit he hopes it’ll stay there. He really should try and find somewhere to stash it, just in case he finds more of the keys and gets a chance to open the door. The lobby is still empty, so Tony crosses to the front door, having every intention to scout around to try and find Steve. And his phone. It’s probably still on the path where he dropped it the night before.

The front door jerks open just as he goes to turn the handle, pulling out of his hand and making him pitch forward. He throws all his weight back again, trying not to fall forward out of the door, nearly over balancing again as his head spins, only to be wrenched to a sudden stop by a hand that wraps around his wrist, catching his full weight. It wrenches his shoulder, elbow and wrist, but Tony is still remotely grateful when he hangs there, off balance but not on the floor. He blinks up at Steve, trying to clear the black spots from his vision, and manages a pained smile. “Hi.”

“Tony?” Steve reaches out with his other hand, grabs the jacket, and pulls Tony upright again, tugging him in close as he runs his hands up and down his arms, rubbing at his shoulder, before settling his hands either side of Tony’s neck, thumbs tucked up against his jaw. “What are you doing here?”

There’s concern and fear written so plainly across Steve’s face that it makes Tony falter, his smile slipping. “I was coming to find you.”

Steve goes pale, eyes widening as all the colour drains from his face. “You were supposed to leave. I thought I told you to leave.”

It still feels like his head is spinning, the ache behind his eyes and across the crown of his head only increasing as he tries to think. He squeezes his eyes shut, lifting a hand to rub at his face, knocking one of Steve’s hands aside as he does. “I tried,” He grits out, feeling defensive. “I tried taking that stupid path through the stupid forest back to the stupid road, after you left me standing there with that stupid manager. I tried. I must have blacked out. Tripped, fallen, something, but I thought you knew that. You found me, didn’t you?”

“No.” At first he thinks it’s a response to his question, but it’s followed up with a litany of other _nos_ that sound like denial. “No, no, no, no. No.”

It’s enough to make him open his eyes and reach out, hand curling around Steve’s forearm. Steve’s face is still pale, eyes still wide, but now they hold a mixture of fear and anger and sadness.

“You didn’t find me?” He asks to confirm.

Steve shakes his head, placing his hand back against Tony’s neck. “No. I was hoping it wouldn’t happen. I was hoping you’d be able to leave. I thought. I thought you might not be stuck here, and that you’d be able to leave, and find help.”

The words sober him right up, chasing away the caffeine withdrawal ache in his head and the hunger gnawing at his stomach, making him forget that his wrist, elbow and shoulder hurt, or just how cold Steve’s hands feel against his skin. “What do you mean, stuck here?”

Guilt flashes across Steve’s face as he drops his hands away from Tony and takes a step back out onto the veranda. He rubs at the back of his neck and can’t seem to hold Tony’s gaze, eyes flickering away from his face again and again. “I didn’t tell you. I was hoping it wouldn’t effect you too. The path back up to the road, I’ve tried taking it several times, tried to leave, and everything gets weird and I can never get further than a certain point before I black out, and somehow end up back here again.”

A shudder works it’s way down Tony’s spine, making his shoulder hitch up around his neck as he tries to fight off the sudden chill. The path, the hotel, everything is just getting too weird. If Steve hadn’t found him on the path, he can’t think of any logical explanation as to why he ended up back in Steve’s room. Beneath it all, he feels slightly betrayed, that Steve would send him down that path knowing what would happen. “Why didn’t you tell me?”

Steve’s cheeks go red as he tries to look at Tony again, only to find something further down the veranda more interesting. “I didn’t want to scare you. I thought that maybe, maybe this place would let you leave, since you’re not from here. I didn’t want you to stay here just because of something I said.”

“You think something is keeping us here?” Tony blinks, shakes his head and tries to ignore the waver in his voice. He’d been aiming for sceptical.

Shrugging, Steve drops his hand away from his neck and does a surreptitious glance around, slowly shaking his head. “We shouldn’t talk here. Come on.”

Despite everything, Tony finds himself taking the hand that Steve offers him and lets himself be lead out of the hotel and into the forest. The whole walk he waits for Steve to start talking again, but his face is grim and silence hangs thick between them. He doesn’t stop until they’ve past the shed and are on the hill above the town. The creepy path back to the road disappears in the dark off to the left, and the town below them is shrouded in darkness.

Steve scouts out the area, carefully positioning himself between the path and Tony, his manner more protective than barricading. “Something odd is going on in this place. It has since the flood. I try not to think about it too much, you see, I have to stay here to watch out for Natasha anyway, so it’s not like I really need to leave. I was hoping you’d be able to leave though. The other man who came here left again, so I thought you would to.”

There is so much going on in what Steve said that Tony isn’t sure where to start, though his mind does latch onto one part before everything else. “There was someone else here?”

Steve’s hand tightens its grip on his, as he glances at the darkness down the hill. “Yeah. A few weeks back, I think. The first new face I’ve seen in a long time. I never spoke to him though, just saw him hanging around the hotel and the town, and the cemetery. It was like he was looking for something.” He shrugs, offering Tony a lopsided smile. “I guess he found whatever it was he was looking for, since he left again. Just as well, he was starting to creep out Natasha. She didn’t like him being around the cemetery.”

“Hang on. Back up a minute.” Tony rubs at his face, trying to clear his mind, which feels like a centrifuge, just spinning constantly. “Are you saying that this one guy, is the only person you’ve seen since the flood happened?”

Frowning, Steve looks perplexed, face scrunching up like he’s trying to figure out an especially difficult problem. “I guess. I don’t know. Things are a little hazy. I forget things sometimes.” He frowns harder after his says the words, mouths them again silently and shakes his head as though he’s disagreeing with himself. “I don’t usually forget things. Tony, something really weird is going on here. And I think, until we figure it out, we’re going to be stuck here.”

Pushing his hand up into his hair, Tony tugs at the strands, trying to override the internal ache with something external. “Fuck. I’d really hoped you weren’t going to say that. Okay. We can do this. Luckily for you, I’m something of a genius. We might just be able to escape this crazy place.”

There’s an overly fond look on Steve’s face, pushing aside everything else. “Genius, hey?”

Grinning, Tony tugs at Steve’s hand, swinging his arm from side to side. “I fixed your generator, didn’t I? And you still doubt me.” Holding his free over his heart, he feigns hurt, batting his eyelashes at Steve. “I’m hurt, darling. I thought you trusted me.”

Red creeps over Steve ears, even as he gives Tony a look far too earnest for the current tone of the conversation. “I do. I do trust you.”

He sounds so sincere it makes Tony’s heart ache. There aren’t many people who say things like that to him and actually make it sound like they mean it. He has to look away from Steve, before he does something silly like demand another one of Steve’s hugs, or kiss him, or any of those other things his caffeine deprived brain is thinking is a good idea. Clearing his throat, he looks over his shoulder towards the road leading down to hill to the town. “So, time to try and crack this case wide open. You said this strange dude spent time in the town, right?”

“You want to go have a look around there too? See what we can see?” Steve asks, shifting a little closer, thumb rubbing over his knuckles softly, almost as though he isn’t aware he’s doing in.

“And all that we can see see see, is the bottom on the deep blue sea sea sea.” Tony mumbles under his breath, then shivers when he thinks about all the water lying around in the valley. Probably not the rhyme of choice. “Yes. Town. We need to gather evidence, try and extrapolate data, figure what’s going on, and get the hell off this rock.”

“Rock?” Steve asks, eyebrow quirking up, but then he shakes his head slowly. “I guess we’d better go and have a look around.”

Tony glances at the path disappearing down into the darkness towards the town, wishing that the sun would come out for a change. He squeezes Steve’s hand, grateful that he’d never let go, before starting down the hill. Shapes start to appear through the dark, blocky and solid, and after a while the dirt path going down the hill gives way to paved footpaths and bitumen road. Peering through the darkness, Tony can make out the street in front of them; one side of the road is lined with buildings, run down and derelict. In front of them, on the other side of the road, not twenty paces away, is a phone booth. Tony drops Steve’s hand and darts forward, useless hope tight in his chest, because he knows that the chances of there being a working phone are slim to none.

The phone booth is old, a three sided shelter over a bench and a phone, open to the weather at the front. Tony skids to a stop in front of it, grabbing the side to stop himself from sliding right past. He lets out a whoop when he sees there is a handset there, an old fashioned round dial. He grabs the handset, yanking it free of the cradle and lifts it to his ear, holding his breath the whole time, until he hears a faint, but distinct dial tone.

“It’s alive!” He cackles, half manic with relief, reaching up and cranking the dial around to nine, then one twice, aware that Steve had caught up with him, standing close behind. He waits for it to call to connect, holding his breath as he hears it ring.

The phone rings once, then there is a distorted crackle and a pop as the call connects. The voice on the other end of the line is whispered and distorted. “The number you are calling cannot be connected. Please confirm the number and try again.”

“This is bullshit!” Tony spits the words out, slamming the phone handset back down into its cradle. “This is complete bullshit. How can 911 not be connected!”

“Tony.” Steve’s breath brushes across his ear as he leans in closer, reaching past Tony to snag the phone’s cord with his fingers. “It’s broken.”

“I know it’s broken, the stupid thing is trying to tell me that 911 isn’t availab...” He trials off, half starting to turn towards Steve when he noticed the frayed end of the cord that Steve is holding. Copper wires poke out of the broken line, the cord between the handset and the phone itself severed. “Huh?”

Steve drops the cord and settles both hands on Tony’s shoulders, pulling him back away from the phone booth trying to turn him away from it, but Tony’s gaze stays fixed on the phone, head swivelling around as his body it turned.

“But there was a dial tone. There. There was a dial tone, and a voice.” Tony stares unblinkingly at the frayed end of the cord, hanging limply from the phone for a long moment, his brain replaying the voice on the other end of the phone over and over in his head. Just like the phone in the hotel, the lack of reception on his mobile. The crazy visions, the creepy path that didn’t want him to leave. He’d just about had enough of whatever weird magic shit was going on in the place. There’s a tightness in his throat, the sort that used to threaten tears when he was a little kid, before he’d learned not to cry. He swallows thickly, blinks rapidly until he’s sure there’s no unnecessary moister in his eyes and finally turns to look at Steve. “I swear there was.”

Concern is etched deep in Steve’s features, his eyes wide and sad as he studies Tony mutely for a long moment, hands continuously squeezing and releasing his shoulders. “I believe you. Tony, I believe you. There’s something really weird going on here.”

“I really fucking hate magic.” Tony grumbles under his breath, dropping his head and looking down at the damp ground beneath their feet. The concrete is cracked and worn, with small tufts of green growing between the segments.

Steve’s hand tighten around his shoulders, he gives a hollow chuckle, sounding like his heart isn’t in it at all. “It’s starting to feel like we’re in an episode of Suspense. Or Lights Out.”

“It’s like the bloody Twilight Zone.” Reaching a hand up, Tony rubs at his face, and barely resists to urge to pitch forward into Steve’s chest and just stay there until the world starts making sense again.

“I haven’t heard of Twilight Zone. Is that another radio serial?” Sounding genuinely interested, like he’s forgotten for a moment just how weird everything is, Steve loosens his hands on Tony’s shoulders, rubbing down over his upper arms.

Tilting his head back again, Tony gives Steve a quizzical look. “A television show. there have been several attempts at it.”

Ears burning red, Steve looks away, jaw clenching a few times before his eyes narrow to glare off into the darkness. “Never had television. Couldn’t afford it growing up. Guess I missed out on a good show then.”

Feeling a surge of privileged guilt, Tony shrugs. “It was okay. I’ll buy you fifteen TVs and the entire series of Twilight Zone, old and new, if you can get me out of this place.”

Steve makes a small choked off sound, like he means to say something, then changes his mind, looking half way between confused, and like he’s going to humour Tony’s eccentricities. “Well then, I guess we’d better keep looking around.”

“Lead on, MacDuff.” Taking a step back, Tony gestures towards the rest of the town, a measure of dread settling into his mind as he follows Steve further along the street. It is all getting too weird for him, and on top of it all, his head hurts and his stomach won’t stop grumbling. Part of him hopes that he’ll just wake up suddenly, in his car, pulled over in some rest stop, and discover the whole thing is just a dream. Steve’s hand knocks the back of his as he sways closer, making guilt surge up sharply. Through habit now, more than anything, he wraps his fingers around Steve’s hand and cast a sideways glance at him. Despite everything, no matter how creepy and weird the town is, he really hopes that Steve isn’t just a part of the dream he wishes he’s having.

The dark shapes along the other side of the street slowly form into distinct individual buildings, the one right on the corner in front of there wearing a faded sign proclaiming that it was a Pet Shop in a past life. Tony tries not to look too hard through the grimy front windows at the cages beyond, filled with lumpy shapes and bones. He sucks in a sharp breath, turning away from the Pet Shop, looking towards the next building, in the process catching the pale, ill look on Steve’s face.

Adam’s Apple bobbing as he swallows, Steve clenches his jaw and stares resolutely at the window. “Everyone left in such a hurry. I always thought that they’d at least have let them go.”

Tugging at Steve’s hand, Tony tows him past the window and on to the next building; deciding that the Pet Shop is going to be the last place he explores for clues. Dead animals aren’t high on his priority list of things to see, no matter how long they’re been dead. Especially not given the distressing way in which they would have died. The next building, backing onto the Pet Shop, looks like it might have been a bar once, given the faded, peeling, image of a mug of beer.

Tilting his head towards the pub, Tony angles a cheeky smile towards Steve. “Think the beer is still cold?”

Steve rolls his eyes, but there’s a smile playing at the corner of his mouth. “I highly doubt it. Power has been off since the flood.”

Brought back to reality, Tony pauses at the window as they pass. The glass is broken in, jagged edges still jutting out of the frame like teeth, the interior beyond is dim, making it so Tony has to lean in close and stare into the darkness until his eyes adjust enough that he can see. Inside the pub is a mess, detritus and tumbled furniture litter the floor, the bar along the back wall sags at one end, the wood supporting it starting to rot. There are broken glasses and bottles all along the back wall, and despite the open window, the place smells of damp, mildew and decay.

Pressing and hand over his mouth and nose, Tony leans in a little further, ignoring the way Steve tugs back on his arm and makes a small distressed noise when he almost snags himself on a shard of glass. “I’m not sure they’re open any more. Pity, I could really go a stiff drink right now.”

“Tony.” Steve pleads, grips tightening as he tugs on Tony’s arm again. “Be careful. You’ll cut yourself.”

Squeezing Steve’s hand in response, Tony taps a pattern against Steve’s knuckles and hopes that it will comfort him enough. “I’m just looking. That’s what we’re doing isn’t it? Searching for clues?”

There’s a glint just below the windowsill, something shiny in the dark that attracts Tony’s attention. It’s long and thin, half buried in powdery, dry mud on top of a table, less than a foot below the window. “Hold that thought. We have something here.”

Moving his hand away from his mouth and stretching up on to his tip toes, Tony reaches through the window, feeling his sleeve catch on the glass just as his fingers brush against the object he’s reaching for. It’s cool to touch, there’s a metallic grate against his fingernail that makes him shudder; pushing up further onto his toes, throwing his balance right off, Tony feels the glass digging into his arm, and he’s instantly grateful that he’s still wearing Steve’s leather jacket and not just his shirt. He feels Steve’s pull away from his hand, then hands grip his waist, holding his steady as he stretches his fingers just that fraction more and manages to pinch the object between the tips of his middle and pointer fingers. Letting out a whoop of triumph, Tony pulls his arm back, rocking back onto the flats of his feet and squarely against Steve’s chest. Glancing down at the object in his hand, he realises it’s another key. It isn’t an exact replica of the one he found in the fish tank, though it has a certain similarity to it.

“Huh?” Steve huffs out, fingers clenching against Tony’s waist, one hand coming up to brush his fingertips against the key in the palm of the Tony’s hand. “What do you suppose that’s for?”

For a moment, Tony wonders if he should mention the heavily barred door behind the reception desk, or the fact that he found another key already. It’s a silly moment, though, he realises, because he’s already trusting Steve to help him get out of this place, has already trusted him with his well being on more than one occasion. “You know that door, right? The one in the stairwell between the lobby and the basement?” He feels Steve nod. “Well, I found a key earlier that fit one of the four locks on that door, and I’ll bet you a hundred bucks that this key fits another one of those locks.”

Steve lets out an agitated sounding hum and steps back, his hands dropping away from Tony’s waist as he does. “I don’t have that sort of money to lose to you on a bet you seem sure to win. I did always wonder why that door had so many locks. What do you suppose is behind it?”

Despite the fact that Steve’s touch always feels cool, Tony feels like he’s lost warmth when he backs away, the places where Steve’s hands and chest had been left nearly painfully icy in their wake. He suppresses a shiver, stowing the second key in his pocket as well, sliding it in so it clinks against the first. Turning away from the pub, so he can see Steve in his periphery, he looks down along the street at the buildings they haven’t looked at yet. “I’d assume, since you are the local and not me, that you’d be more qualified at guessing what Creepy McCrepperson is keeping locked behind that door. But, from experience, people don’t guard something so tightly unless they really don’t want people getting to it.”

Eyes flashing with some sort of boyish excitement that is completely foreign to Steve’s usual worried persona, Steve’s mouth twitches up in a smile. “Maybe he’s some sort of mob boss, some big time crook from the city. He might have all his illicit gains behind that door.”

Tony can’t help but smile at Steve’s excitement. It’s the most animated he’s seen him being since they met, and for once, he seems to be expressing emotions that aren’t steeped in concern or sadness. “Could very well be, big guy. I guess there’s only one way to find out. We just need to find two more keys, and we’ll be able to crack this case wide open. So, what do you say? Onwards?”

The street in front of them keeps going for a few more buildings, before ending in a right hand turn, taking the road out of view. The next building along is a two story brick building with no signs or distinguishing features. It looks almost like it might have been a private residence back in the day, but now the awning over the front door has collapsed on one side, hanging precariously over the door like a guillotine. The windows in the upper floors are broken, jagged teeth of glass waiting to bite anyone who tried to enter; while the lower floor windows were bored up from the inside.

Steve approaches the building, steps careful and quiet, body language defensive. He reaches out and touches one of the boarded up windows, pushing at it, but it doesn’t appear to give at all. Taking a couple of steps back he surveys the whole façade of the building. “I don’t remember the windows looking like that.”

Moving to stand beside Steve, Tony looks at the building as well; the wood panelling in the windows is faded, weathered grey over time, it seems as though it is far from a new addition, despite Steve’s claims. “It doesn’t look that new?”

Frowning, Steve steps forward again and pushes both hands at the wood. At first it looks like it is going to produce the same results as last time, the wood holding fast for a few seconds before it gives altogether. There’s a metallic squeak of nails pulling out of wood, and then the whole board pushes inwards and drops away from the window frame with a loud clatter. Caught off guard, Steve nearly pitches right into the empty window, catching himself at the last moment on the edge of the window frame.

“Jesus Christ!” Steve yelps, pushing himself away from the building and stumbling back on to the footpath, catching himself on Tony’s shoulder, his face pale before he glances at Tony and looks ridiculously shame faced, colour creeping into his cheeks and ears. “Sorry.”

Pressing a hand to Steve’s back, Tony tries not to clench his fingers in the man’s shirt, his own heart hammering in his chest, even though he wasn’t the one who nearly fell into a building. He rubs his hand across Steve’s back, hoping it’s some sort of comfort, feeling his ribs rising and falling beneath his touch as he pants. “Really wasn’t expecting that to happen. You okay?”

Steve nods mutely, licking his lips and swallowing thickly, rubbing and hand over his face and back through his hair, making blond strands stick out at all angles. “It didn’t even feel like budging just before. I don’t get it, I didn’t even push that much harder just then.”

“Maybe the first nudge just loosened something?” Tony muses, though he’s not sure if the amount of pressure Steve used would have been enough to do that. Belatedly, he realises in his lack of concentration his hand has settled low on Steve’s back. He jerks his hand away before Steve calls him out on being inappropriate, approaching the building again to cover his own discomfort. Carefully dodging the side of the awning that is hanging down, he reaches out to try the door handle. The handle turns after a bit of jiggling, and he hears the latch grate back out of its housing, with a slight push, the door swings open with a groan of protest, scraping a clean path through the dust and detritus that litters the floor. Leaning in closer, Tony peers into the darkness of the room, not for the first time wishing he still had his phone, or had bothered to pack a torch in his car in case he ever lost his phone. The interior of the building is rather small, just a short entry before it splits into two directions, one a short three step staircase leading up to a door to the right, and to the left it looks like the floor dips away into shadows, that Tony assumes might be a decent to a basement or something similar. There’s a smell in the air, something stale and musty, but there’s something else under it too, something sickeningly sweet that he can’t place. In the darkness, he thinks he can see something moving.

He nearly jerks out of his skin when a hand grabs his upper arm and pulls him back, but he bumps straight into Steve, when he swings around to defend himself. “Shit! You scared the hell out of me.”

“Sorry,” Steve murmurs, eyes flitting between awning just above them and the dark interior of the building. “I don’t know how safe it’s going to be in there.”

Safe or not, Tony feels like this is exactly the sort of place that they should be exploring for clues. If Steve doesn’t remember the windows being boarded up, then it is a pretty good indication that either his memory is slipping, or that someone else has been using the building more recently that Steve has been in the town. “Maybe not, but I’m starting to think that nothing about this town is safe, Steve. I guess we’ll just have to stick together and watch each others backs.”

Steve’s face is set in grim determination, he nods once, then steps around Tony so he’s closer to the door. Taking a moment to study the doorway and the dim room beyond, he knocks a fist against the door frame, looking like he expects that whole building to fall down around their ears; however, only a smattering of dust and grit rains down. “I’ll go first. Wait a bit before you follow.”

Feeling restless and wanting to argue, Tony watches as Steve crosses the room carefully, going still every time the floor boards creak, though he makes it across the room without incident, until he’s standing where the floor disappears to the left. Upon Steve’s beckon, Tony follows his footsteps across the floor, eyes darting every which way for a sign of what he’d thought he’d seen moving before, but there’s nothing but stationary stone walls and the odd lifeless box or crate. Taking the hand that Steve offers, somehow finding comfort and security in the cool touch of his skin, Tony allows himself to be pulled across the last few feet to stop beside Steve atop a set of stairs that dip away steeply. His eyes are slowly adjusting to the gloom, and after a minute or so of standing there beside Steve, tapping out inane binary patterns against the back of his hand, Tony can make out the door at the base of the stairs, heavy and industrial looking, matching the pipework that he can now see creeping down along the walls in various places around the interior of the building.

“What was this place?” He asks under his breath, not really expecting any sort of response. There’s a flutter of increased pressure on his hand, and after a moment of silence he looks around to find Steve frowning at various places in the room, looking confused and lost.

“I don’t know. I don’t remember.” Steve whispers, looking back at Tony, expression twisted as though he’s trying to hide his fear. “I should know. Buck and I used to go to the bar next door sometimes. I used to play with the puppies in the pet store. I lived in this town, and I can’t for the life of me think what this building was before the flood. Stupid. It wasn’t even that long ago. Last year, year before.” He stops, glaring at the door at the base of the stairs with grim determination. “Left or right?”

As much as he wants to pry, to ask more about the flood, try and uncover some of the memories that Steve obviously is having trouble recalling, Tony doesn’t. The mention of the dead best friend does put a bit of a dampener on everything, so he lets that change of conversation slide and focuses on the new question at hand. “We’re here now, might as well see what’s down there.”

They descend the stairs the same way they crossed the room, Steve going first and Tony following once he’d reached the bottom. Surprisingly the door isn’t locked, and despite the weight of it, it opens without too much force. In the dimness it’s hard to tell anything about the room at first, except for the vastness of it that Tony can feel more than he can see. It’s the lack of anything in site that makes it the room feel large. Over the sound of their breathing and the thud of his own heart in his ears, Tony can make out the steady lapping sound of water, matching up with the scent of damp that is so much stronger inside the room. Peering through the low light, Tony steps further into the room, noticing that further back there is light coming from high above. It isn’t much, not better than the dreary daylight outside filtering through the ever present mist, and after he squints at it a moment longer, it reveals itself to be some kind of grating.

“We’re underground.” As he says it, Tony knows it sounds stupid, since they went down from ground level, but this isn’t a basement like he suspects it might have been. “No, I mean, we’re below the street now, see that, over there.” He gestures towards the grating above them. “That’s some sort of storm water drain. We’re in, what must have been, essentially, the sewer.”

“The pump station.” Steve says quickly, one word tripping over the next and he moves to Tony’s side again. “That’s what this building was. It was a pump station.”

Glancing around, Tony starts picking out different features of the room. There’s pipes and banks of controls, taps and pressure gauges along the wall to the left. Straight ahead, there’s metal railing and a gap for a ladder, to descend into the sewer proper, however, the way the light is glinting beyond the railing, Tony suspects the water level has risen considerably, due to the still submerged part of town, and the whole place is flooded. Off to the right, there’s a shape, something that doesn’t appear to be mechanical at all, standing upright, taller than him, but still vaguely human shaped.

The figure is still, unnaturally so. Tony freezes, staring at it, waiting for a twitch, a breath, a sigh, anything that will give it away as human, but there’s nothing. He reaches out, knocking his hand against Steve’s chest to get his attention, nodding his head towards the figure, feeling a chill run down his spine, the sort that comes from being watched.

Steve stiffens beside him, bristling with defensiveness as he shifts between Tony and the figure, putting his arm out and back to hold Tony behind him. “Hello? Someone there?”

The figure doesn’t move. There’s no reply, no indication that it even heard them. Tony squints at it through the gloom, trying to pick out the features of it from the shadows. The proportions don’t seem quite right, everything bigger and wider than it needs to be, making it less human and more, man made. Edging his way around Steve he takes a few steps closer, able to pick out more details.

“It’s a dive suit!” He laughs, half hysterical with relief, feeling foolish for ever being nervous about the shape in the dark. He doesn’t get scared of the dark, he tries to remind himself. Even as a child it hadn’t scared him. It’s just, this place. Or maybe the knock to the head he took in the car. Maybe he never even made it out of the car and this is all just something he’s hallucinating as he bleeds out all over the front seat.

Sure enough, it is a dive suit, old and cumbersome, nothing at all like the wet suits and scuba gear he’s used before. It looks almost like the Hazmat dive suits that he’s seen before, but certainly not as well put together and modern. It makes sense that it’s there then, in a sewer, it must have been required for maintenance. It’s suspended out over the water on some sort of gantry that looks like it hasn’t moved in more than a few years, the grease on the joints, rollers and pivots is blackened and solidified into lumps like dry sap. By leaning out over the railing, hands gripping the top rail, Tony can get a better look at the suit itself, even in the dim light he can see that it is a little worse for wear, covered in a thick layer of dust and grime, with one gauntlet missing, and a small hole in the chest of the suit. There’s also no signs of oxygen tanks at all, not suspended with the suit, or nearby the railing or along the edge of the wall.

“Why would anyone be wanting to go into the water?” Steve asks, a sharp edge to his voice that sounds almost pained. “What could be down there that someone would want so bad?”

Tony stops poking at the hole in the chest, just large enough to fit the tip of his little finger into it, and twists enough that he can see Steve, still standing well back from the railing, arms folded over his chest and shoulders hunched, staring at the water. His face is pale, the colour drained out of it, until all Tony can see is nearly white skin and dark shadows under his eyes, giving the man a ghastly appearance in the low light. “Are you okay? Steve?”

Steve snaps his head up, dragging his eyes away from the water, throat bobbing as he swallows, then, with what seems like a great effort, he straightens up his shoulders and unfolds his arms, tucking his hands in his pockets instead. He nods, slowly, very deliberately not looking back at the water. “I’m fine, Tony.”

He wants to argue, because that was not the look of a man who was fine. That was the look of someone who was terrified of something. He doesn’t argue though, doesn’t press the point, as much as he’d like to, not only because he knows that Steve won’t appreciate it, but because as he turns to look back at the suit again, his eyes catch on something further over, on the other side of the gap in the railing for the ladder. Moving towards it, Tony pats the shape with his hands as he gets there, feeling rusty metal panelling against his skin. Crouching down in front of it, Tony runs his hands over the glass fronted dial screens, wiping away grime with his thumb, squinting at their faces to read the measurements beneath. At a guess, he’d say that it was the gas compressor for the dive suit, a surface supplied system that would be hooked to the suit via umbilical hoses. Making note to look for them later, Tony fiddles with the dials, surprised when they turn easily, despite how long it must have been sitting unused.

“What have you found now?”

Steve’s voice breaks his concentration away from surveying the motor beneath the panel on the side of the gas compressor, which he’d managed to remove with the screw driver he’d kept from before. “Just looking at this air supply compressor. For the suit. Figure I could probably get this running again, then if I can find some umbilical hoses, and patch the hole in the suit and find the missing gauntlet, I can probably have this whole thing up and running again.”

There’s a small choked sound that makes him look around at Steve, who stands there eyeing the water with concern again. “Why would you want to get it running again?”

The question pulls him up short, making him go still with his fingers still poking at the innards of the compressor. “Huh?”

Steve swallows, throat bobbing as he wrenches his eyes away from the water to give Tony a suspicious look. He rubs his hands over his chest, hands clenching into fists spasmodically. “Why in the world would you want to fix that and go underwater?”

Glancing over at the suspended suit again, then back at the compressor he’s already mentally deconstructing, Tony realises that he’d been so caught up in the _what_ and _how_ of the situation that he hadn’t given the _why_ any thought at all. His brain just comes back with ‘ _why not?_ ’ but somehow he doesn’t think that is enough of an answer to satisfy Steve. Instead he gives Steve a slightly embarrassed smile and stands up again, pocketing the screwdriver and stepping away from the compressor. “Sorry. I just saw something that I can attempt to fix, something that I know I can get working again, and I just,” He flaps a hand non-committally, hoping that Steve will catch the meaning.

There’s still a pinched, uncomfortable look about Steve’s eyes, but some of the tension slips out of his stance, shoulders relaxing a fraction. “So you don’t really want to go in the water?”

Shrugging, Tony glances at the dive suit again, wondering where his mind had been going before. There really isn’t any reason to go in the water, not that he can see yet, anyway, but his brain had just been on a binge of _fix fix fix_ when he’d seen the suit and the compressor. It made sense that in all the weirdness and crazy of this place he’d latched onto the one thing that he was familiar with and knew how to fix, even if it didn’t require fixing. “I really don’t think so. You’re right, it’s a stupid crazy idea, and I’ve probably just about had my quota of stupid and crazy. Besides, there’s no telling how long this has been sitting here rotting and deteriorating.”

Frowning, Steve mouths the words _‘how long?’_ like they don’t make sense, giving Tony the quizzical look he did every time he mentioned something about technology. “Not that long, I don’t think. I don’t remember it being here when Buck worked here before we joined the army.”

Even without knowing the exact timeline of Steve’s life, Tony isn’t sure that the man is remembering right. The dive suit and compressor are both definitely older than a decade, which doesn’t fit in right if Steve is roughly the same age as him, somewhere in his late twenties to early thirties which is what Tony would say at a guess, though he knowns from experience that he’s pretty terrible at guessing peoples’ ages. Jan’s slapped him enough times for always over estimating ages. Thinking of Jan makes Tony’s stomach and chest clench with longing; it nearly knocks the air out of his lungs just how much he misses his friends. His throat clenches and vision swims, despite how rapidly he tries to blink, he can feel tears trying to form. He wants to go home. He wants to get out of this stupid, crazy place with all the secrets and things that don’t make sense. He wants to go to Rhodey’s, which is where he’s meant to be right now, and hang out with his best friend, and go around to Roberta’s for lunch on the weekend, and get spoilt rotten by his surrogate family who he hasn’t seen in what feels like forever.

“Tony? Oh, Tony. What’s wrong?” Steve’s suddenly right there, gripping his shoulders and pulling him forward, running a hand through his hair and over the side of his face, blue eyes brimming with concern. “Are you okay?”

He tries to nod, tries to swallow past the burning lump in his throat, but he can’t manage. A sob wrenches itself out of him, jerking his whole body as it escapes, but that’s all Tony allows himself to let out, clenching his jaw and firmly reminding himself of the words he’d grown up hearing _‘Stark men don’t cry’_. When he feels like he’s got his emotions in check, he tries to offer Steve his best PR grin. “I’m okay, big fella. Just tired and over this place. I really want to go home.”

The concern in Steve’s eyes doesn’t dissipate so much as it gets overwhelmed and completely overrun by sadness. He pulls Tony in against his chest before he has too much time to study the changing expression on Steve’s face, feeling arms wrap around his back and shoulders and hold him close.

“I’m sorry, Tony. I’m really sorry you’re stuck here.” Steve murmurs, words pressed into Tony’s hair, breathe cool against his scalp.

He tries to resist the urge to just curl into the embrace, tries to keep himself held poised and distant, but his body has different ideas, leaning heavily against Steve and all but collapsing into the hug. Wrapping his arms around Steve’s waist in return, he presses his face against his shoulder, breathing in the smell that he’s come to associate with Steve, that mix of leather and aftershave and sweat. “Not your fault, big fella. I’d still be stuck in my car if it wasn’t for you.”

Steve emits a distressed little groan, arms tightening. “We should go back to the hotel for a bit. You should eat something, maybe sleep a little more. It might make you feel better.”

Pressing his face harder against Steve’s shoulder, Tony valiantly tries to ignore the way his stomach rumbles. He really didn’t want to eat anything in this place, that little suspicious voice in the back of his mind that put too much stock in Spirited Away is telling him that it’s a terrible idea. “I don’t want to turn into a pig.”

Steve chokes out a confused laugh. “That’s not about to happen when you eat like a bird.”

As if to prove a point, he presses his fingertips in against Tony’s ribs, making him squawk indignantly and wriggle out of his grasp. Glaring at him, Tony makes a show of straightening out his borrowed leather jacket, pretending to ignore the amused smile on Steve’s face, even though he’s secretly glad. It’s a vast improvement from the sad, lost look the man usually wears. “That was a low blow, mister, a low blow.”

“Just proving my point.” Steve rebuts, looking far more smug than he has any right to, in Tony’s opinion, as he turns back towards the stairs. “Can we get out of here now?”

Despite the expression on his face, there’s a brittle edge to his voice that reminds Tony just how freaked out Steve was before about the water. He feels bad for keeping Steve down there as long as he had, especially since he hadn’t discovered anything useful. With a surface supply oxygen system, it wasn’t like he could use the dive suit to just swim on out of there. If the town really is trying to keep him stuck, blacking out under water is probably the dumbest thing he could ever do. Pushing that unpleasant thought out of his mind, he follows Steve back up the stairs leading out of the underground. He pauses on the landing at the top, glancing at the door at the top of the short staircase.

“I might just have a quick look in there.” He calls to Steve, who’s already at the front door again. “While we’re here, you know.”

The metal stairs creak and groan ominously under his feet as he treads up them carefully, but they hold as he climbs them, pausing at the top to try the door handle. It catches a bit as he turns it, but after a sharp jiggle, it rolls over and the door opens. It’s heavy to push in, he can hear things grating across the wooden floorboards as the door pushes them aside, until he gets it open enough that he can slip through into the room. It’s lighter in there than it had been downstairs, bright spots of light coming through the windows nearly blind him as his eyes struggle to adjust again. The smell hits him as he clenches his eyes shut to give them a chance to recover. That sickeningly sweet stench that he’d caught a faint whiff of when they first entered the building. It makes his stomach roll and his mouth water at the acrid taste that catches in the back of his throat, threatening the urge to vomit.

Pressing his nose into the crook of his elbow, trying to override the smell with the much more pleasant scent of Steve’s jacket, Tony blinks around the room, jerking back in shock when his eyes settle on a figure slumped over the desk beneath the window on the far side of the room. As his eyes finish adjusting, Tony knows there’s no point in hoping that it’s the dive suit scenario all over again, because it really isn’t. There’s no mistaking the sharp lines and dark hollows of the skull that stares out at him from beneath a clump of tangled, thinning hair, from where it lies on the desk. The rest of the body is a mess of decaying clothing, dust, cobwebs and bones. What look like ribs and small hand and finger bones litter the floor beneath the desk and chair, while the tibias and fibulas are propped up at unnatural angles by the two heavy boots on the floor, like a macabre flower arrangement.

With the door open, the stench of old death lessens until Tony drops his arm away from his face and steps a little closer into the room. It’s hard to determine much about the person who the skeleton would have been before death, the hair left has turned a murky red with age, while there was little left of the clothing except scrappy clumps of rotting material caught on bones. He’s never really bothered to look into the science behind death and decay; striving towards the future is certainly more his thing, so Tony isn’t sure how to tell how long the person had been dead, but with the damp feel to the air of this place, he thinks it could be anywhere from years to mere months. They weren’t really the sort of conditions that would preserve a corpse well.

But then, biology was never his strong suit.

The skull, some vertebrae and the bones of one hand and arm lie atop the desk, for most part undisturbed and still in near perfect positioning, amid a myriad of other refuse littering the surface. Empty exoskeletons of insects, crumbling chunks of plaster that had come away from the brick walls, fall on and between hard cover books and yellowing stacks of paper covered with faded ink. On the wall in front of the desk, beside the grime covered window is a piece of board, thumb tacks pressed into it, but there is nothing left of the paper that they must have held there in a previous life, barring the odd torn corner still clinging to a tack. Taking a step closer, Tony squints at the board, at one of the slightly larger scraps of paper held there, yellow with age. In newspaper typeface Tony can just make out part of the subheading, the article title itself torn through the first letter. There is one full word and part of another, in small font that read _Stolen Tre-_ before the paper is town away.

It seems as though someone really didn’t want to leave much in the way of evidence behind.

Glancing towards the window, too tarnished to see through, Tony follows the line of the window frame downwards until it meets the desk. There’s something wedged there, between the heavy wooden desk and the wall, tucked into the small gap made by the protruding window frame. Crouching down to get a closer look, Tony fits his fingers against the edge of the object, feeling soft fabric covering something hard. He manages to hook his fingertip over the corner of the item and pull in towards him, out of the gap, until he can get his fingers around it properly to pull it free. It’s perhaps half an inch thick, maybe six by four inches in size, wrapped in fabric that’s threadbare with age. Folding back the layers of material, Tony reveals a book, leather bound cover stiff and slightly warped with age, but it folds back easily enough to reveal the pages within. Ink scrawling cover the pages that Tony flips through, occasionally interspersed with sketches and diagrams. There’s one technical diagram that looks like the dive suit in the sewer below. A few pages in front of that, Tony picks out the words _‘I know it’s here somewhere, there is no where else that he could have hidden the treasure. I just have to find it, before someone else does. I feel like there is someone else here searching too. This town is meant to be abandoned but I feel like I’m being watched.’_

“Tony?” Steve’s voice calls out from the other room, causing Tony to snap the journal closed again feeling like a kid caught with his hand in the biscuit jar, even though he doesn’t think he’s doing anything wrong. Inspecting the journal to make sure he hasn’t damaged it, he stands up just as Steve’s form fills the doorway.

“What’d you fin...” Steve trails off, eyes glued to the skeleton, face going pale as he inhales loudly. “Jesus. Tony, who’s that?”

Looking back at the skeleton, Tony really isn’t sure what is going on. The few hints he picked up from the journal lead him to believe that he’ standing near the remains of the stranger that Steve have mentioned before, who was searching the town. Except everything in the room looks as though it has been there for quite a while. “I don’t really know, he hasn’t been polite enough to offer his name. Maybe you should ask him.”

For a second it looks like Steve’s eyes are going to bug out of his head, then he frowns in confusion before shifting his gaze to Tony in an unimpressed glare. “That’s not what I meant.”

Taking a few deep breaths, Steve steps into the room, eyes darting all around like he’s assessing the place for danger before he treads carefully across the room to stand next to Tony. He keeps looking at the skeleton and glancing away again, swallowing thickly every time he does and breathing out loudly on every exhale. “Thought after the army I’d be used to seeing death. It just seems so wrong in my home town, you know.”

After a moment’s hesitation Tony reaches out and grips Steve’s shoulder, squeezing it tight. “I can’t even begin to imagine.” To change the subject, he gestures with the journal. “I found this stashed between the wall and the desk. At a guess I’d say he meant for it to stay hidden, but really, if you’re going to hide things, you need to do a better job than that.”

Steve jerks his head around, tearing his gaze away from the skeleton to look at the journal that Tony’s holding. “A book?”

Feeling a grin tug at the corner of his mouth, Tony drops his hand away from Steve’s shoulder so he can flip the journal open again, leafing through the pages. “It looks like a weird combination of field notes and paranoid ramblings. I might be a genius, but even I need more than a couple seconds to read this. From what I can tell, this guy seemed convinced that there was some kind of buried treasure in this town, and was determined to find it before anyone else did. I’ll have to read a bit more before I make any solid conclusions, mind you.”

Steve goes unnaturally still next to him, pulling him up short on his ramblings, glancing back up to find Steve staring back down at the skeleton, face deathly pale again. “Steve? You okay, buddy?”

Steve blinks once, but doesn’t take his eyes off of the skeleton. “That man who was here, he was looking for something. Do you think they were looking for the same thing?”

“Maybe it’s the same person.” Tony offers as a counter, carefully watching Steve’s face for a reaction; he frowns slightly, lips pressing together tightly, but he doesn’t say anything. “Think about it. If the guy you saw was here searching, and he didn’t find this guy, then he can’t have been searching real hard. What if they’re one in the same-”

“No.” Steve interrupts, shaking his head, still frowning at the corpse. “No. Because I only saw him a couple days ago. This can’t be the same person.” He shakes his head again, blows out a frustrated breath and scrubs a hand over his face, tugging at his hair. “No. I’m sure I only just saw him. A couple days ago?”

It sounds like a question. Steve glances around at Tony, looking lost and confused, hair sticking up at all angles from where he was tugging at it. “I think. I don’t know. I can’t remember.”

Tony’s mind jumps back to what Schmidt said about Steve, about him coming back from the war and not being okay. He doesn’t know much about PTSD, but there’s a chance that Steve’s trouble with his memory could be from that. He swallows down any of his own concerns or worries, reaching out carefully to take Steve’s hand in his. “Hey, it’s okay. I’m sure you’re right. That other guy, the one here recently, he must have found what he was looking for and left. Or he was a terrible sleuth and gave up. Either way, you’re right, can’t be the same person. Stupid suggestion.”

Gripping his hand tightly, Steve doesn’t look all that convince or relieved, but he nods after a moment, looking a little out of it. When he replies his voice is croaky, “Yeah. Stupid.”

“I think we should get out of here. I don’t know about you, but I could do with some fresh air.” Tugging at Steve’s hand, Tony takes a step towards the door, his foot connecting with something as he does and kicking it several feet across the room. Glancing down, he can’t see what it is, only the swirling disturbed dust and the marks where it has skittered across the floor. He almost makes a move to investigate closer, but Steve’s death grip on his hand reminds him that he has more important things to worry about.

The walk back to the hotel is uneventful, though Tony feels a little odd for being the one leading Steve, rather than Steve leading him. When they get back to the hotel, Tony carefully tucks the journal inside his borrowed jacket, so he has a free hand to open the door. They hesitate just inside the door, Steve still looking mildly shell shocked as Tony untangles their fingers and lets go of his hand.

Steve lingers once Tony drops his hand, eyes trained on him. He blinks several times and the blank expression he was wearing resolves into something more determined. “I guess I’ll go find some food then.”

Tony’s stomach rumbles at the mention, though he resolutely tries to ignore it. “Yep, you do that. I’m just going to try a couple locks, grab my tools. See what there is to see. Meet back in five?”

Nodding once, Steve pivots and heads for the stairs, the creaking floorboards give away his location as he goes. Tony tracks him for a moment before he heads for the stairs behind the reception desk, already seeking out the keys in his pocket. He passes through the door and nearly collides with someone else. Heart in his throat, Tony automatically brings his hands up into a defensive position, biting down the noise that tries to escape his throat.

Schmidt stands before him, face twisted and sagging, making him almost unrecognisable in the gloom. Flinching back at the sight, Tony takes a step back into the lobby, proving fruitless when Schmidt follows him back into the light. The ghastly visage from seconds before morphs back into the man’s normal face, perpetually displeased expression intact.

“Back from town so soon?” Schmidt asks, a disgusting smirk tugging at his lips. “Find anything interesting?”

Tony bites his tongue to stop himself asking how the hotel manager knew where they’d been. He doesn’t want to give anything away; he certainly doesn’t want to mention the dead body or the dive suit, or the keys in his pocket that feel inexplicably hot and heavy. It’s only years of being in the public spotlight that stop him from fidgeting under the scrutiny. “I had a lovely stroll, thanks for asking. Eyed off some prime real-estate. What do you think of me rebuilding and reopening the town? It’s got water front views now.”

It’s callus and horrible to even consider, but Tony puts on his best PR smile and knows the only way out is to bluff Schmidt. He’s just grateful that Steve isn’t within hearing range.

Schmidt sneers, his face twisting hideously, a strong scent of damp and decay permeating the air between them; the stench of the room above the sewer that Tony’s sure it stuck in his sinuses.

“You should leave well alone, boy.” Schmidt warns, eyes taking on a dangerous look. “That town was rotten to the bone. An incompetent Mayor, so caught up in his own ambitions he was useless. Couldn’t see the bigger picture, if you will. I suppose the lack of foresight is what killed him in the end. He’s survived by his wife, a pretty young thing, she was, back in the day. Beautiful and elegant even as she aged, but you know what they say about looks and how deceiving they are. They say their marriage was as rotten as the town. He died under suspicious circumstances, it’s said. they arrested a man for his murder. An ignorant young fool who thought he was in love with the Mayor’s wife. They say love will make you do foolish things. Poisoned the Mayor, they say, then resisted arrest and was killed for his troubles.”

Schmidt pauses for a moment, looking bored and disinterested. “But really, poisoning is a woman’s game, is it not? Men prefer to kill with their hands, than their minds, wouldn’t you say?”

The chill that slides down his spine and clenches around his heart makes Tony shudder, even though he knows showing signs of weakness in front of Schmidt is the worse thing he could possibly do. He keeps the fake smile plastered over his lips. “There is only so much that hands can achieve without the mind behind them.”

“It sounds like you know a thing or two about death, boy.” Schmidt counters, looking disconcertingly approving.

He wants to reply, has some sort of snarky comment on the tip of his tongue when it feels like his throat closes over and his vision swims, blurring and greying over. Despite the fact it’s happened before, Tony feels panic claw at his chest, head spinning as his ears go deaf to everything around him. Images flash before his eyes, a stash of valuables, money, gold, finely done paintings and an old pistol that reminds him of something German, like a Mauser or a Luger. There’s a painting, a serene landscape, that cuts away to a man he doesn’t recognise being forced back into a chair by hands around his throat, even as he tries to claw the hands away. It jumps back to the painting again, then the stark splash of crimson blood over the canvas, before the whole image slides down, past the man now slumped lifeless in the chair to his hand hanging limply, and piece of paper clasped between his fingers. Tony barely has time to read the words _Property Deed_ before the vision dissolves and he finds himself slumped against the reception desk, gasping, his head pounding and ears ringing.

Tony blinks, looking around the lobby and at the doorway in front of him, but Schmidt is no where in sight. It begs the question then, how much time he just lost of that vision. Sucking in a deep breath, he tries to straighten up, but his knees buckle and his head spins. There’s an awful nauseous feeling in his stomach, the type that reminds him just how long it has been since he ate, and the ache behind his eyes is back with a vengeance. He really needs to eat something, he knows it. He’d give his right arm for a coffee. He can’t even remember the last time he drank any water. Logic and that lack of immortality means he’ll have to give into the base needs eventually, but there is still that doubt, that bit of fear that once he does, then this place will be real and not just some horrible dream.

He’s not sure he’s ready to face that reality just yet.

“Tony?”

He jerks around at the sound of Steve’s voice, and nearly collapses as he loses his hold on the reception desk. Steve’s at the bottom on the stairs, a tray held carefully in his hands. The smell of coffee if nearly enough for Tony to swear his undying allegiance to Steve, even as he thinks about the scene in Spirited Away where the parents turn into pigs.

“Christ, Tony.” Steve crosses the room in long strides, setting the tray down next to the evil broken phone and darts around the reception desk and grab Tony by his upper arms. Tony nearly pitches forward into Steve’s chest, his legs threatening to give out, putting far more of his weight on Steve than he should have. The grip on his arms tightens, then shifts until Steve has one arm wrapped around his ribs, slinging one of Tony’s arms over his shoulder, and he feels himself all but carried over to the lounge chair and deposited on it roughly. The lounge protests audibly, emitting the strong scent of musty, damp wool, but Tony is extremely grateful at not having to try and keep himself upright any more.

“Here, drink.” Steve is right there in front of him again, voice and presence commanding in a way that reminds Tony that Steve had been in the army. He feels something cool pressed to his bottom lip, a hand on the side of his face angling his head back slightly. Water trickles into his mouth; it’s either swallow or start spluttering and choking, so Tony pushes aside his fears and does as he’s told.

After the first swallow, his ignored thirst takes over and he manages to get a hand around the glass that Steve’s holding and gulps down its entire contents. Head spinning a little less, Tony holds out the empty glass again, feeling Steve take it from his hand, the hand against his cheek, for a moment, feels more like a caress than support, before it withdraws.

Blinking his eyes open, Tony offers Steve a smile, hoping that it’ll alleviate some of the concern that’s etched into his features. “I’m okay, sugarplum. Stop fussing.”

Steve’s cheeks and ears flame red, there’s a look in his eyes that Tony can’t even begin to decipher before he turns away, setting the glass down on the table and grabbing a plate instead that’s loaded with a sandwich that looks fit to bursting. When he turns back, he levels Tony with a no nonsense look that is somewhat ruined by the blush still present on his cheeks. “You’re not fine. Eat.”

Feeling like the pet name slip might have been too much already, Tony resists the urge to salute Steve with a _sir, yes sir_ and takes the sandwich that Steve hands him. The bread is soft and fresh, on the first bite he tastes the smoothness of smoked ham, the bite of a rich cheese, the sweetness of fresh tomato, crisp lettuce and the tang of mustard. After the first bite he practically inhales the rest of the sandwich, ignoring the small voice in the back of his mind telling him it’s a terrible idea. His stomach grumbles and rumbles, reminding him just how long it’s been since he ate, and he feels vaguely sick from eating too fast.

Steve watches him carefully, having moved from where he was crouched near Tony’s feet to sitting on the edge of the coffee table next to the tray of food. “Feeling better?”

Tony nods absently, too busy eyeing the pot of coffee still on the tray to give the question too much thought. “If you value your life at all, Steve, I’d hand that coffee over right now.”

There’s a smile tugging at the corner of Steve’s mouth as he pours coffee into a mug and hands it over, though it slips back into concern when he sees the way Tony’s hand trembles as he takes it. “Do you need something more to eat? How long has it been since you ate? Slept?”

Shrugging, Tony gulps down half the coffee, not even caring how hot it is, before pressing his nose to the rim of the mug and inhaling deeply. “Slept before. Ate some time. I don’t know. Is it important?”

The look Steve gives him clearly asks what sort of idiot he is, waiting, silent and unimpressed as Tony finishes his coffee and holds out the mug for a refill. Steve takes the mug and fills it again, but doesn’t hand it back straight away. “Of course it’s important, Tony. I left you alone for five minutes and when I came back, you looked ready to pass out.”

“Oh, that.” Tony flaps one hand dismissively while making a grabbing motion with his other towards the coffee mug, trying his best innocent, pleading look out on Steve, with not effect. “That wasn’t the lack of food or sleep. That was your creepy as fuck boss and all the weird shit that’s been going on since I got here.”

An unnatural stillness comes over Steve, coffee mug held halfway out towards Tony as he freezes, the colour draining from his face and something sharp and dangerous taking over his eyes. “What did Schmidt do? Tony, did he hurt you?”

The chill that runs through Tony has nothing to do with the lack of coffee and everything to do with the expression on Steve’s face at the mention of Schmidt. It’s a stark, stark reminder that Steve was in the army, that Steve possible killed people while he was there. It’s a look, Tony thinks, that means Steve would be perfectly capable of killing Schmidt if he thought it was something that needed to be done. He shakes his head quickly, despite the unnerving feeling he’s got that maybe he should be more scared of Schmidt than just creeped out. “No. No, he didn’t hurt me.”

Steve’s knuckles have gone white around the handle of the coffee mug, and it takes a fair effort to pry it out of his hand. Tony sets the mug back on the table, shuffling forward to the edge of the lounge and closing both his hands around one of Steve’s. “Hey, I’m okay. He didn’t hurt me.”

Not looking at all placated, Steve does relax marginally, his shoulders losing some of their tension and the dark look in his eyes shifting back to something closer to their usual concern. His thumb brushes against the palm of Tony’s hand as drops his elbows onto his knees and slumps forward. “All I’m hearing right now, Tony, is that he did do something, so, spill.”

Heaving a breath, Tony shrugs again. He’s not even sure how to explain what it is that Schmidt has been doing, or anything else that has been going on since he got here. The visions aren’t something he knows how to explain, if he puts words to them, then it’s just going to make him seem as crazy as he feels. For all he knows they’re just hallucinations caused by a blood clot in his brain from the crash. It’s probably the most plausible explanation for everything, though it isn’t a nice thought at all. “I don’t know that happened. You headed up the stairs, I went to look at locks, and then he was just there. Being all ominous and creepy and not about to win any customer service of the year awards. He knew we’d been into the town. Did you say anything about that?”

Steve’s fingers spasm against Tony’s hands and he shakes his head, narrowing his eyes in displeasure. “No. I trust that man about as far as I could throw him. Fella’s shifty. Kept telling ya to stay away from him, didn’t I?”

It had been mentioned, Tony thinks, maybe, somewhere along the way. He pats the back of Steve’s hand, glancing wistfully down at the coffee mug, but he’s not ready to let go of Steve’s hand either. “Yeah. Might have done. Which begs the question, how’d he know? But that’s not even the important part. He said something about the town, that it was rotten, and the mayor was rotten, and that he’d been killed, murdered, by some kid who had been in love with his wife. Though he heavily implied that it wasn’t the kid that did it. Seems like he suspected the wife.”

As he talks he feels Steve’s tense up again, his hand start to tremble between his. The room suddenly feels colder, Steve’s skin going pale and colder than normal and he start shaking his head, grinding his teeth together. Suddenly he jerks his hand away from Tony’s, and he’s on his feet and pacing the room before Tony can figure out what’s going on. Steve paces back and forward, tugging at his hair and clenching his jaw, he keeps glancing at the door behind the reception desk and then back at Tony again, something desperate in his eyes.

The flurry of movement and agitation in the room has Tony’s head spinning again; despite that he stands up, taking a careful step towards Steve as he makes his way back towards the coffee table. Steve stops, rocking slightly in place as he keeps tugging at his hair, but he doesn’t back away as Tony takes another step towards him. “Steve? What’s wrong?”

Steve shakes his head, breathing harshly, then holds his breath, letting go of his hair to rub both hands over his face before he drops them, clasping his hands behind his back and settling back on his heels, shoulders squared. He glances at the door again, exhaling, before he turns his attention back to Tony, eyes determined. “I need to go find Natasha. I need to make sure she’s okay.”

It might be the lack of caffeine, or the fact that his head is still spinning like a merry go round, but Tony isn’t quite sure he follows what’s happening. “I’m sure she’s fine.” He tries to placate, wanting desperately to reach out and try to comfort Steve, like the he’d had done for him time and time again, but he seems impossible to reach.

Frowning, Steve gives him a look that he can’t quite decipher. “I know you’re trying to be comforting, but,” he stops, licks his bottom lip, then brings his hands back around in front of him and grips Tony’s shoulders tightly. “But you don’t understand just how dangerous this place really is, Tony.”

Tony thinks about Schmidt’s talk of murder, the skeleton in the pump station, the paranoid ramblings in the journal that is tucked against his ribs. The way Steve’s been acting since they got back from the town. The latent fear and protectiveness in Steve’s eyes. He reaches up, curling his hand around Steve’s right wrist, brushing his thumb over the soft, thin skin over his stark blue veins. “I think I’m starting to, buddy. Now, what do you need me to do?”

Relief flashes through Steve’s eyes, his lips twitch up in one corner, and for a moment, all Tony wants to do is close the space between them and kiss him. The moment is fleeting, hardly long enough for Tony to even really focus on the impulse, let alone start to analyse the urge.

“I need you to come with me. I’m not about to leave you here alone again.” Steve squeezes his shoulders, then moves away, heading for the door behind the reception desk. “I have a pretty good idea where Natasha will be at this time of day. She’s always visiting Buck in the afternoons.”

Taking a moment to scull another few mouthfuls of coffee straight from the pot, Tony jogs after Steve to catch up, nearly bumping into him when he finds that Steve’s stopped at the bottom of the stairs in the breezy room before the generator. Even with the thump of the motor right next door, the room they’re in doesn’t seem to have any lights, however, with the dim daylight filtering in, Tony can make out a few more features of the room than he’d seen the first night there. A good portion of one wall is missing, giving way to a view out over the water, towards a dark smudge in the mist that Tony thinks must be the cemetery. There are stones stacked in piles that once might have been neat, near the missing wall, though it’s nearly impossible to tell if the wall was never completed or if it had fallen down. In the same wall, is an old, rickety looking elevator, the type with metal folding doors and a pulley system that Tony can quite clearly see. It looks like little more than a metal cage suspended on cables, which is disconcerting given the fact that Steve is making a beeline straight for it.

“Where does that go?” He feels like he’s looked at the elevator before and asked the question, but like a lot of things in this strange town, he can’t figure out what is in his head and what is actually real. Edging closer to the hole in the wall, Tony carefully leans out over the stonework. There’s a drop below, a good fifty feet, down to the waters edge, where there is a short wooden pier jutting out into the water with boat tied up to it.

Steve forces the metal gate open with a protesting groan, then steps back, holding a hand out towards Tony. “Down, come on.”

There’s a level of urgency in Steve’s voice that reminds Tony how desperate he is to find Natasha, but he can’t help but hesitate a moment, eyeing the elevator suspiciously. He knows mechanics and electronics, and given a few basic tools and some ingenuity he can fix just about anything. The elevator, however, looks nearly beyond fixing. He’s all for taking risks, but usually calculated risks. And only ever when he’s the only one who is likely to get hurt. The idea of getting in a metal death trap with Steve and Steve being the one to get hurt, it makes Tony’s blood run cold.

Steve holds his hand out a little further, starting to frown slightly. “Don’t you trust me?”

 _Yes_ , Tony thinks, _yes, a thousand times yes. Inexplicably yes_. He reaches out and takes Steve’s hand, letting himself be towed closer. “It’s not you that I don’t trust. It’s the mechanical integrity of this elevator. Not sure if I’ve mentioned before, but I’m something of a mechanical genius. I can make a lot out of a little, but this thing, darling, this metal cage right here, it’s hanging from little more than dental floss, and I’m not sure I trust it.”

Giving his a bemused look, Steve ushers Tony into the elevator and drags the door shut again. He pulls a leaver on the side of the cage, and with a heavy groan they start to descend.

Surprisingly the cables hold and eventually the elevator jerks and shudders to a stop at the bottom of the short cliff; Tony waits as Steve forces the gate open again, relieved to get out of there as soon as he can. He would much rather trust something he’d built himself. The ground slopes away from the base of the cliff, a road leading down to the waterline and disappearing alongside the pier. Following Steve down towards the water, Tony studies the pier. It doesn’t look any newer than any of the other architecture of the town, but he supposes the wood could have just weathered quicker being so near the water. The boat that is tethered to it appears to be a similar vintage, a basic wooden hull and small outboard motor, though at first glance there doesn’t appear to be any holes in it.

“Is there no other way over to the cemetery?” Tony asks as they stop on the pier, the wooden planks groaning and flexing under their feet.

Steve crouches down to grab the tie line, tugging the boat closer to the pier and gripping the side of it to hold it steady. “Unfortunately not. The high road that goes past the cemetery comes off the highway a few miles down. The highway that neither of us can get to.”

Remembering the creepy path and what it had done to him, Tony shudders, even though he wishes he’d gone back along it earlier to retrieve his phone. The mist seems thicker out over the water, from the pier he can’t see the cemetery on the other side of the water, just a vague dark shape lurking in the mist. “Okay, so boat it is then.”

There must be something in his voice that gives away his apprehension, because Steve reaches out and squeezes his hand again, holding onto his fingers tightly. “Can’t say I’m real keen on the idea either. Think you can use your mechanical genius to get this motor going? “

Tony knows a diversion tactic when he sees one, but he’ll gladly find something else to focus on, other than the decrepit boat that may or may not make the journey across the water. Using Steve’s hand for balance, and relying on him to hold the boat steady, Tony clambers in and moves towards the small motor.

It takes a few goes to get the motor going, but it splutters into the life easier than Tony thought it might. As the engine coughs a few times before starting to run smoothly, Steve undoes the tie line and clambers into the boat, settling so they’re balanced in the water. Taking hold of the tiller, Tony engages the propeller and slowly starts moving the boat forward as Steve gives it a strong shove away from the pier.

“Better point me in the right direction.” Tony calls out over the sound of the motor, grinning when Steve literally points out across the water, a little to the right of where the nose of the boat was currently pointed. Angling the tiller slightly, Tony heads the boat in the right direction. The motor is a little too noisy for them to talk over the top of it, so Tony trusts Steve to keep him on the right course.

The dark shape in the mist gets closer; revealing itself to be the top of a building. A tower of sorts that protrudes from the water, the rest of it submerged with the town below. The town that Tony had been trying not to think about, except now as he leans out over the edge of the boat he can see the murky shapes of buildings below. He eases off the throttle as the boat gets closer to the tower; there’s something about it that seems familiar, something that makes Tony want to stop and take a closer look. A feeling that compels him to investigate, like it is one of the most important things that he has to do.

He can’t shake the feeling, even as he feels the boat rock suddenly. Wrenching his eyes away from the tower, the shuttered window that he’d been focusing on, Tony shifts his attention back to the boat, trying to figure out what caused the sudden movement. Scouting the water ahead and to either side of them, he can’t see anything that they might have hit. Immediate threats eliminated, Tony surveys the interior of the boat, something cold settling in his chest when he catches sight of Steve.

Steve’s sitting at the front of the boat, shoulders hunched, curled in on himself. One hand grips the side of the boat, knuckles white, while the other arm is wrapped around his stomach, face pale as he stares at the tower.

“Steve?” Calling out, Tony speeds the boat up a fraction to move them away from the building. “Hey, big fella, you okay?”

Steve’s eyes stay locked on the tower for a moment longer, until he blinks and shifts slightly, turning to face Tony again. He shakes his head, a nearly imperceptible movement as he swallows thickly, blinking again. “I’m fine.”

Raising one eyebrow sceptically, Tony wishes that he could just stop the boat and move closer to Steve, to offer some sort of comfort. Despite all of Steve’s body language telling him not to push it, he’s never been very good at leaving well enough alone. “You look like you’ve seen a ghost.”

Bristling, Steve glares, jaw tensing. “I’m fine, Tony.”

Everything in the tone of his voice tells Tony that he’s over stepped, and for once he listens to the unsaid command. Focusing instead on keeping the boat heading in the direction it had been before. The further they go the more Steve seems to relax, though he stays hunched over for a long time.

When they’re surrounded by mist again and Tony can no longer see the details of the tower behind them, he ventures to ask another question. “What was that place? A town hall or something?”

Steve’s jaw clenches and his nostrils flare as he inhales and exhales, not audible over the chug of the motor. He stares out through the mist for a long moment before shifting his gaze back into the boat, not quite looking at Tony. “It was the church. The bell tower.”

Hearing the phantom ringing of the church bell in his ears, the sounds that permeated his visions, Tony feels cold all over. No wonder he felt like the tower was somehow significant; it had been centre to a lot of his visions, early on, before they started being about chess pieces and guns. There’s something about it, Tony just knows that it’s important somehow. Just like the visions of dead men. “I’ve seen it before.” He mumbles, not able to catch himself before he does.

Steve straightens up, alert, eyes narrowed slightly, frowning as he puzzles through something. “How have you seen it before?”

Surprised that Steve had even heard what he said, Tony just shrugs, saved from having to answer by the shore drawing nearer. He focuses on bringing the boat in close to the shore, aiming for a sandier part of the bank, since there didn’t appear to be a pier on this side. Steve jumps out of the boat as it runs onto the sand, grabbing the front of it and hauling it higher up onto the sand as Tony shuts down the motor and tilts it forward, lifting the propeller out of the water. Once the boat is settled, Tony stands up, carefully making his way to the front, letting out and indignant squawk when Steve wraps his arms around his chest and lifts him out of the boat and across the foot or so of water to deposit him on dry ground. Straightening his shirt, Tony pretends it isn’t bitter disappointment in the back of his throat when Steve sets him down and lets go so he can drag the boat up out of the water entirely, hooking the tie line around a wooden post that seems to be there just for that purpose.

With the boat secure, Steve turns back to him, frowning again, arm making a jerky, halting movement like he’d been about to reach out before he stopped himself. “What did you mean before? About having seen the church?”

“We should go find Natasha.” Tony says, meaning to distract Steve entirely, turning away from him to look at the cemetery behind them. He takes a step forward and it pulled up short when Steve grabs his wrist and tugs him back.

“Tony.” Stressing his name like it’s both a question, command and a plea all at once, Steve gives him an imploring look.

He’ll think he’s crazy, Tony’s sure of that much, if he tells Steve about the visions. He’ll either think he’s crazy, or be all mad and concerned about him like he is just about every other time something happens. To be honest, Tony isn’t sure which will be worse. Steve’s disappointed dad face, or knowing that Steve thinks he’s crazy. It’s a lose lose situation if he ever saw one. He meets Steve’s eyes with all the challenge he can muster and sucks in a deep breath, letting it out all in a rush of words. “Ever since I got to this batshit crazy place, I’ve been having these visions. Moments where everything goes wonky and dizzy and I’m seeing and hearing things I have no right to see or hear. None of it makes sense, it’s all water, dead bodies, chess pieces, guns, and the bloody church bell, just ringing and clanging away inside my head. I’m half sure it’s some sort of hallucination, probably a blood clot in my head or something like that. I’m half convinced that this isn’t even real and I’m just dying slowly, alone in my car, and-”

Tony cuts off halfway through his ramblings when Steve suddenly grabs at him and pulls him against his chest. Face pressed against Steve’s shoulder, Tony isn’t really sure what to do, he can feel Steve shaking, hear him breathing a little harsher than normal, and he’s hugging him tight enough that it makes his bruised ribs twinge. He must wince, because Steve lets go and steps back just as suddenly as he grabbed him, face showing clear signs of distress as he holds Tony at arms length and surveys him carefully. Trying to offer a reassuring smile, Tony tilts his head to one side, inadvertently bumping his jaw against Steve’s hand on his shoulder.

Steve’s face softens, until he no longer looks like he’ll murder someone, though there is still a fierce determination there. “You’re not dying. I’ve seen men with bad head injuries before, the sort that kill ‘em, and you’re not one of ‘em. You’re not dying.”

He isn’t sure he can argue with Steve, when he looks like he’d take on the whole world, just to prove his point. “Okay, sugarplum, I’m not dying. Which means that this is all real, and whatever freaky magic stuff it is that has us trapped here, is also giving me creepy visions, because apparently I need those on top of everything else.”

Steve’s cheeks and ears go red, which is a vast improvement from how deathly pale he looked a moment before, though he doesn’t pull away, which Tony fully expects him to do if he keeps dropping terms of endearment like that. He feels Steve’s thumb stroke the side of his face once, a small, jerky movement like he’s trying it out, to see if he’s allowed to.

Breath catching, Tony tries to clear his throat, but it comes out as little more than a strangled squeak. It’s quite pathetic that such a small amount of affection has him falling apart at the seams. Straightening up, he squares his shoulders, giving Steve a wide, sardonic grin. “Have I ever told you how much I hate magic? Because I do. I really hate magic.”

Huffing out a laugh, Steve drops his hands away from Tony’s shoulders, moving past him towards the path leading away from the waters edge, towards the sentinel like headstones in the cemetery. “I’m inclined to agree with you. Something certainly isn’t right here. We should find Natasha.”

“Yeah.” Tony agrees, following Steve along the path, unable to shake the feeling that he just missed something. A chance at something. Though he’s sure he’s just projecting, that his lonely mind is just imaging affection that isn’t even there.

The cemetery feels old, the headstones worn, some of them listing to the side. Those closest to the water are weathered the worse, stone crumbling in places, engraved words nearly entirely worn away. The further in they go, the newer everything starts to get, though everything is overgrown with weeds, creepers and thistles taking over the grave tops and the paths between. It is a far cry from the cemeteries that Tony has been to in the past, the one where his parents are buried was all manicured lawns, glossy headstones and neatly arranged flowers.

He nearly stumbles as it hits him, this is the first time that he’s been in a cemetery since his parents died. He hadn’t even gone to Jarvis’ funeral. Hadn’t been able to face the fact that he was suddenly, truly alone in the world.

It’s still one of his biggest regrets in life.

Pushing the memory from his mind, Tony keeps following Steve further into the cemetery, winding their way right down the back. The headstones stop before they do, Steve leads him down a gentle, pebbly slope towards a tree line. Against the fence that cuts the cemetery off from the forest, Tony can make out a row of simple headstones and plain wooden crosses. Natasha sits at the end of the row, a shawl wrapped around her shoulders, silvery red hair like fire in the weak sunlight. Her hands are dirty, the top of the grave in front of her picked bare of weeds, and a small bunch of wild roses lies at the base of the cross.

“Natasha?” Steve’s voice is soft as he steps closer to her and the grave, moving to crouch down near her.

Natasha turns towards Steve, her face blank, tears smudging her make-up down her cheeks. She blinks a few times, then reaches up to dab at her eyes with a spotless white handkerchief, a false smile stretching her lips. “Oh, Steve, dear. I didn’t see you there. Have you come to visit James as well?”

Steve’s shoulders hunch over slightly, his head ducking down. There’s pain in his voice when he speaks. “I did, ma’am. But I’m also here to make sure you’re alright.”

Tony feels like an outsider, standing back away from these people who knew each other, who had grief in common. He has no part in this. He’s not sure what drove Steve’s urgency to check in on Natasha, but now that he can see she’s okay, he feels like he’s part in this is finished. Taking a step back, he turns and wanders back up the slope towards the cemetery proper. He finds a place a respectable distance away, but where he’s still within view of Steve and Natasha, he picks a clear patch away from the graves and sits down, retrieving the journal from within his jacket.

The journal looks worse for wear, having been stuffed inside his borrowed jacket for as long as it had, part of the back cover bent back and the fabric over the spine starting to peel away. Running his fingers over the torn seams, he feels something hard catch against his fingertips. Turning the book over in his hands, he studies the tear, picking at it with a fingernail until it widens enough for him to probe around inside the cover. There is something cool and metallic inside the cover, pushing at it from the outside of the cover, and snagging an edge with his fingernail, Tony eventually manages to extract another key. It looks very similar to the other keys he’s found so far.

He slips the key into his pocket, along with the other two and turns his attention back to the journal. Leafing through the pages he notices the way the initially neat script turns to a messy scrawl the more recent the entries get. Stopping, he flicks back a few pages to before the writing becomes almost illegible, reading through the entry. There are no dates on the pages, nothing the indicate the passing of time except for the degradation of the handwriting. Scanning the text on the page, Tony can’t help but wonder if the author had always been a little on the crazy side. There is a lot of talk about hidden treasure, a huge wealth that had been stolen and brought to the town by one of the residence, where it had disappeared. It’s almost as if the man was obsessed with finding it, wouldn’t rest until he had. The pages reveal that the stranger was responsible for having the dive suit set up to use, convinced he had to search through the sunken part of the town.

It’s very repetitive, Tony finds, other than a few sketches and the talk of fixing the dive suit, it’s is all pretty boring. About to disregard the whole thing as a lost cause, Tony leafs over a couple of pages and stops of a page that is taken up entirely by the sentence ‘ _he’s watching me_.’ The choppy, frantic scrawl is gone on the next page, nearly back to normal, a little more sloped and hasty than before, but nothing like that one page. Right at the bottom of the page, after talking about finding a key in the old school building, the stranger makes another reference to being watched, but the part that baffles Tony entirely is the man’s claims that there shouldn’t be anyone there to watch him, since the town was abandoned.

Tony sits there and frowns at the page for a long time, before tipping his head up enough that he can see Steve and Natasha at the grave. They’re standing now, Steve with his arms folded across his chest, shoulders set in that way that Tony’s come to think of as Steve’s _me against the world_ attitude. Natasha has one hand resting on his arm, and Tony definitely doesn’t feel a twisting pang of jealousy at that, but her attention is still directed at the grave she’d been at before. James, she’d said. Someone they’d both lost. He can’t help but wonder if James and Bucky are one in the same, given the nickname nature of Bucky, it possible. Maybe he just doesn’t want to think that they’d both lost two people who were important to them. It’s not something he’d wish on anyone.

Glancing back at the journal, Tony glares at the claim that the town is abandoned and flips to another page. The man obviously hadn’t been including the hotel as part of the town, which he guessed could be forgiven, considering that it was fairly removed from the rest of the town, the parts that connected it long under water. There was also the way Steve had talked about the man, like he either hadn’t bothered, or hadn’t had the chance to meet him, just seen him from a distance. Maybe it was Steve that the stranger had thought was him.

Maybe he was just reading the ramblings of a mad man.

When it seems like there is no more information to be found on the dive suit, Tony flips to the back of the journal again, flipping through the pages until he comes to the last entry, which only seems to prove his theory on the stranger having been crazy. He claims to have seen someone, someone who should have been dead.

He feels a chill run down his spine and settle in his lower back and between his shoulder blade, which he can’t shake off, no matter how tightly he pulls Steve’s jacket around his shoulders. He’s never been superstitious, he’s an engineer, a man of science and fact and all things tangible. Ghosts and haunted houses are the sort of things he scoffs at, but he can’t shake the chill. The setting probably isn’t helping, he realises. Sitting in a cemetery while reading paranoid ramblings about ghosts is probably not one of his smarter ideas, he can imagine Rhodey laughing at him if he knew he was scaring himself. He’ll never let him live it down if he ever finds out.

Deciding that he’s had enough of the ghost stories, Tony closes the journal and tucks it back inside his jacket, and pushes himself back up to his feet. Dusting off the back of his pants, he checks that the three keys are still secure in his pocket and starts to meander back down the slope towards Steve and Natasha. He doesn’t want to intrude on their conversation, but at the same time, he doesn’t really want to be alone. Stopping when he’s still a little way away from them, he decides to wait for a break in the conversation before he interrupts.

He doesn’t mean to eavesdrop. It isn’t his intention at all, but he’s a bit closer than he should be, and can hear snatches of Steve’s voice, can see the carefully blank look that covers Natasha’s features, but notices the way her fingers have curled around Steve’s arm and are clutching tightly.

“-knows. I don’t know how, Natasha, but he seems to. Something Tony said, it’s like he’s figured it all out, about Pierce, about James.”

It takes a moment to piece together what Steve’s saying and to realise that despite the mention of his name, he isn’t actually the topic of the conversation. It must be Schmidt that Steve’s talking about, and about the tale Schmidt had told him that he’d relayed to Steve back at the hotel, that had gotten him so agitated. The tale of a corrupt mayor, his beautiful wife, and the young fool who loved her. This is why he was so desperate to talk to Natasha; because this was Natasha’s secret.

“It is all history, Steve, things that have past and cannot be undone. We’ve all done things we regret. I do not think Johann is much of a threat to me, even if he knows what happened. That man has too many secrets of his own, too much to hide. He won’t do anything with what he knows.” Natasha replies, her voice vague as she keeps glancing between Steve and the grave they stand beside. She frowns slightly, staying focused on the grave, then lets go of Steve’s arm to reach up and dab at her eyes again. “He was a good boy, Steven. A lovesick fool, but he was a good boy.”

Steve’s shoulders slump slightly, his head tipping down and he kicks the toe of his boot into the ground. “I made him a promise, Natasha. That I’d watch out for you. I don’t think you realise just how dangerous Schmidt is. There’s something in him, something so inherently evil. I saw a lot of it, during the war, in the men that sent boys off to die for them. Don’t underestimate what men like that will do for power. I promised Buck that I’d protect you, so, just, be careful.”

The chill that’s lingered in Tony’s spine starts to intensify; cold wrapping around his ribs and squeezing at his lungs until he can’t breathe. Everything starts to go grey around the edges of his vision, in that nauseating yet familiar way, that makes him think ‘ _oh no, not again_ ,’ before his vision greys out entirely. Images dance in front of his eyes again, a chessboard, black queen standing over a toppled white king, a single black pawn at her side. A figure slumped over the table, scattered chess pieces all around. The black queen again. The slumped figure, except this time further away, and Tony can see one arm hanging down at his side, a wine glass on the floor, wine tipped over the carpet. There’s a shadow cast over the figure, strangely shaped. Then back to the black queen and the single pawn.

Tony comes back gasping, trying to suck air into his burning lungs. His head spins, reeling from the images that don’t make sense, though he feels like he understands them better than he has any right to. The strange shadow cast over the dead man, in the vision it had been unclear, but now, in the weak, misty daylight of the cemetery, looking at where Steve and Natasha stand, turned towards him, he thinks he understands. There’d been two people in the room, watching the man die.

Steve’s suddenly there in front of him, gripping his shoulders and holding him up, concern etched into his features, forehead crinkled with a worried frown, lips thin and pressed tightly together. He holds Tony up, for a long moment not saying anything. When Tony feels slightly steadier on his feet, Steve relaxes his hold a little, letting go of his shoulder with his right hand to reach up and brush Tony’s hair back from his forehead. Tony tries not to lean into it, he really does, for maybe half a second, before he’s pressing his face into Steve’s hand.

“You okay?” Steve asks, voice thick with worry, catching on the hard sound, thumb stroking over Tony’s cheekbone tentatively.

Humming in affirmation, Tony closes his eyes and lets himself enjoy the moment more than he should. Now is really not the time or place to start pretending that Steve actually liked him in any way other than as a friend. It was a lovely fantasy, to imagine that Steve’s actions were born from anything other than concern for his general health. Squeezing his eyes tightly to try and banish the thought from his mind, Tony slowly straightens up, extracting himself from Steve’s touch and taking a step back, blinking his eyes open again. “Don’t worry about me. I’m superdooperly okay.”

Still frowning, there’s a look of sadness and hurt that flashes across Steve’s face before it disappears and is replaced by a fierce sort of determination. “What was it this time?”

“What was what?” Tony counters, automatically on the defensive, only to receive a pointed look from Steve, who obviously saw straight through his bullshit. Glancing at Natasha over Steve’s shoulder he shakes his head, flapping one hand dismissively. “I’ll tell you later.”

Steve frowns at him for a moment longer then shakes his head like he’s dismissing an argument he didn’t voice. “You’re still pale. Stay here, sit down, head between your knees, whatever you need. I’m going to see if I can find some water.”

Before he leaves, Steve throws a look over his shoulder to Natasha. “Keep an eye on him, please. I’ll be right back.”

Tony watches as Steve jogs off up the slope back towards the cemetery proper, wondering briefly where he intends to find drinking water in a place like this, before he shifts his gaze back around to find Natasha regarding him with a blank look.

“You should sit down. Steve’s right, you are pale, dear. Like you’ve seen a ghost.” Natasha stares at him for a moment longer, unblinking, before she shifts her gaze back to the white crosses lining the fence. “This is the place for ghosts, after all.”

 _N_ _ot a_ _ghost_ , Tony thinks, though he does take Steve’s advice and sit down, hoping that he isn’t sitting on anyone’s grave, _just a murder victim and his killers_. He rubs a hand over his face, pressing it over his eyes and squinting at Natasha through the gaps between his fingers. He might be jumping to conclusions, it makes sense though, that Natasha is the wife of the late mayor. She doesn’t look like a killer, though Tony’s not really sure what one is meant to look like. Less ladylike, he expected. Less like someone who reminds him of his mother, that’s for sure. Natasha seems too elegant. Not that he has any proof, just the words of the world’s worst host, and a handful of visions of chess pieces. It’s not something that would hold up in court. Besides, he wonders about what Schmidt had told him about the mayor, the allusions to him not being a good man, about the rotten marriage to his beautiful wife. Gossip though it might have been, Tony can’t help but think there might have been truth in it. There’s a haunted sort of fragility to Natasha, hidden behind layers of elegance and social strength, the sort he saw in women at the shelters his mother had started. Maybe her husband deserved everything he got.

She looks back at him, tilting her head to one side and pursing her lips in thought. “I guess you’re wondering what sort of insane lady I must be, weeping over a grave like I only buried the man a week ago?”

To be honest, it isn’t even a thought that had crossed Tony’s mind. He knows what grief is like, that it hit when it wants, even years after the fact. He isn’t about to judge her just for visiting a grave of someone she cared about.

When he doesn’t respond, Natasha keeps talking, clasping her hands together in front of her, fingers twining around her handkerchief. “I could tell you that story. Or I could tell you another. The story of a young man, who loved someone so deeply, even though he knew they’d never love him back the same way. He would have done anything for them, and in the end he did. He died, trying to keep a promise that he’d made. A loyal fool with a heart of gold. It’s what killed him in the end. His need to save those he loved.”

Tony isn’t sure what to make of the tale, he hadn’t asked to be told anything, and yet Natasha seemed to think he needed to know. He’s not real sure who she’s talking about, but when he adds in all the other clues, what Schmidt had told him, the grave that Natasha visits everyday, he can only guess that she’s talking about Bucky. Except, he thought that she’d loved Bucky as well, from how Steve talked. Maybe it was the fact that she was already married, that she was alluding to.

There’s a crunch of footsteps on the gravel behind him; twisting to look over his shoulder, Tony sees Steve coming back down the slope, and metal cup in his hand, staring at it with the concentration of someone trying not to spill the contents. There’s that little crinkle between his eyebrows that Tony finds undeniably adorable. When he’s almost there, Steve glances up, his expression goes soft when he catches Tony looking at him, a little smile tugging at the corner of his mouth. Not for the first time, Tony is so grateful that he’s got Steve with him. He’s so glad that he isn’t stuck in this crazy town all by himself.

Steve stops next to him, holding the cup out towards him. “It’s clean, promise.”

Taking the cup, Tony eyes the contents critically, but despite not knowing where Steve managed to find water at a cemetery, it does look to be clean as promised. He takes a sip, surprised that it actually tastes okay, not stale and only the hint of a metallic tang that suggests it might have been stored for a while. He drains the cup quickly, starts to stand up, feeling Steve’s hand on his lower back and side to steady him as he wobbles a bit. He’s not sure if the visions are getting more malicious, or if it’s just the lack of sleep and how long he went without eating that is having ill effect.

Glancing over his shoulder at Steve, Tony offers him a tired smile, blinking slowly as his head spins before settling. “We okay?”

Steve’s hand twitches against his back, fingers flexing like he wants clench his fingers around the back of Tony’s jacket and not let go. He looks over at Natasha, who has gone back to staring at the grave.

She looks around, sensing the attention and gives Steve an empty looking smile. “It’s all right, dear, you go along now. I’ll be fine here.”

Her words feel like they hold a lot left unspoken, most of which Tony can’t even begin to guess; from the corner of his eyes he sees Steve nod stiffly, mouth set in a way that shows he isn’t really happy to leave Natasha here. He glances at Tony, then jerks his head back in the direction of the boat, unspoken question in his eyes. Tony nods, suddenly feeling ridiculously tired and wanting nothing more than to curl up and sleep for a week, if he could afford the time. Steve’s hand lifts off his back, there’s a moment long enough for Tony to miss it, before Steve’s hand knocks against his and he grabs at it before Steve changes his mind.

As they turn to go, Natasha turns her attention back to them. “Take care of him.”

Steve stiffen slightly, frowning, then nods. “Yes, ma’am. I plan to.”

Despite the fact that Steve answered, it’s Tony who Natasha made eye contact with, her pointed look directed at him. Not sure what to say, he nods once, slow and deliberate, keeping eye contact. He’s not sure how much taking care of Steve needs, or how much he can offer, but the tone of Natasha’s voice is half a plea, half a directive, and he isn’t about to ignore that. She gives him another empty smile, the type that doesn’t reach her eyes and mouths the words _good boy_ , before the pressure of Steve’s hand in his turns him away from Natasha and they start back up the slope.

The walk back to the boat is quite, Tony isn’t sure how to summaries the journal, or how to tell Steve that he think his friend murdered her husband and someone else took the fall for it. That someone else being Steve’s good friend. It’s all speculation, though, there’s no proof, and he can’t bring himself to say anything without proof. Not if it’s something that is going to upset Steve. Though, he suspects that Steve knows anyway, given how he reacted when Tony recapped what Schmidt had said, which begs the question how Steve could forgive Natasha, and still insist on protecting her.

It’s another thing he’s not sure how to bring up in conversation, even once they’re back in the boat and leaving the cemetery. As Steve pushes the boat back out into the water and spins the nose around so it’s facing away from the shore, carefully clambering in before the water gets to deep, Tony notices for the first time that there isn’t another boat there. There is only the boat they came in.

“How’d Natasha get here?” He asks before he can stop himself, glancing further down along the shore to see if he can spot a boat anywhere along there, but it turns rocky not much further along, making it improbable to moor a boat elsewhere.

Steve shrugs, glancing back out across the water. His pants are wet to the knees, and despite the warm air, he’s shivering slightly. It’s enough to distract Tony from his curiosity, and he opens up the throttle, the motor coughing slightly as it speeds up. The mist hasn’t lifted at all, in the time they were in the cemetery, but Tony can see the dark shape of the church looming up ahead, and keeps his heading just off to the left of it, since it had been on the right on the way over.

As they draw closer, the ever present ache inside his head starts to intensify, thrumming behind his eyes in time with the rhythm of the motor. When he can see the details on the tower, the rusty hinges on the single shuttered window that faces out towards them, the peeling paint and the missing shingles off the roof, his vision starts to grey around the edges, everything going unfocused, and all he can do is groan and utter a few words before he feels himself swaying in his seat and his hand slips off the tiller. “Oh no, not again.”

It’s like he’s underwater, looking up at the light filtering through, something drifting down towards him, getting closer, but just as he thinks to reach for it, the vision shifts again, to the church bell, swinging backwards and forwards, the clanging of it echoing inside his head until he wants to press his hands over his ears and scream. Then he’s outside, somewhere he doesn’t recognise, in a street, there’s a figure running down the street away from him, towards the church. Water rolls over him, chasing after the running figure. In the water, something drifts down towards him, he reaches up towards it.

He comes back gasping, feeling his head spinning and gagging. It takes a moment to settle back into place, to figure out where he is and what’s going on. The boat is rocking violently, he’s slumped forward, pressed against something solid. He blinks into Steve’s chest, his arms tight around his back, one hand cradling the back of his head. He shifts, turning his head, his vision swims again, when it settles again he’s staring at the church tower.

“Someone died in there.” He wasn’t sure of the fact until the words tumble out of his mouth, but once he’s said them he can’t imagine how else it could have played out. Someone ran into the church as the flood hit. Surely there was no other way it could have gone.

Steve lets out a distressed sounding whine, his fingers clenching around Tony’s hair, arm tightening across his shoulders. “Jesus, Tony, you scared the hell out of me. You nearly pitched right over the side.”

“Someone died in there. In the flood.” He repeats, because Steve doesn’t seem to have heard him the first time, and it’s important, something that needs to be said.

Steve shudders. He’s quiet for a long time, when he speaks, it’s slow and deliberate, like he’s choosing his words carefully. “No. No one died in the flood. The town was evacuated.”

Getting his hands up against Steve’s chest, Tony pushes himself back upright, past the resistance of Steve’s hold. He looks at him, at how pale he is, how wide and blue his eyes are, at the fear in them. Steve shakes his head, one hand still clinging to Tony’s shoulder. He knows what he has to do now, somehow it all makes sense, what’s keeping them trapped in this town. It has to do with the flood, with the murder of the mayor, with the church. They’re all linked somehow and he has to figure out what it is. He has to solve the mysteries of the town if he ever plans to escape.

He catches Steve’s gaze and hold its. “I’ve got to go into the town, under water. I’ve got to figure out what happened here.”

If possible, Steve pales further and keeps shaking his head, his mouth moving but no sound coming out.

Tony nods, reaching up to press his hand to the side of Steve’s neck, thumb stroking his jaw. “I think it’s the only way we’re going to get out of here.”

Steve stops shaking his head, licks his bottom lips and blows out a loud breath. After a moment, he clenches his jaw and nods his head. “Okay. All right. But first you’re going to get some sleep, and eat something more. You can’t keep blacking out like that. Especially not in the water.”

They float there for a few more minutes, drifting away from the church tower, until Tony feels like his head has stopped spinning enough to get the outboard motor started again. The trip back to shore is slower than before, in part because the boat is slightly off balance since Steve’s sitting closer to him than before. When they finally draw level with the pier again, Tony’s relieved to be off the water. There is something hugely disconcerting about driving a boat over the top of an old town, especially with the way his visions suggested that the town hadn’t been as evacuated as everyone claimed it was, when the water came rushing in.

Steve helps him out of the boat once it’s secured back to the pier, and he doesn’t even hesitate when Steve takes his hand and started leading them back towards the hotel. He can’t even bring himself to protest when they get to the metal death trap of an elevator, his head is so wrapped up in the latest vision, the idea of the water pouring into the church and drowning the person trapped there. He goes through a shower on autopilot, eats the food Steve puts in front of him, drinks the water and crawls into Steve’s bed without hesitation. It feels like only hours ago that he was there, waking up to Natasha singing in a language that he didn’t recognise, yet, at the same time, it seems like it was years ago that that happened.

He settles against the pillows, then, eyeing the door with it’s missing handle and lock, he rolls out of bed to rifle through his clothes in order to find the journal and keys. Steve watches him curiously as he tucks the keys inside the journal and then shoves the whole thing under the side of the mattress he was on before. At Steve’s raised eyebrows, he just shrugs and then gestures towards the door. Steve looks at the door for a while, frowning in confusion, as though he only just noticed the extent of the disassembling Tony had done the first morning. After a moment, Steve crosses the room again, and drags the chest of drawers over slightly, so it’s blocking the edge of the door, just enough to keep it closed, but not enough that it would be had to move if they had to leave the room in a hurry.

“You weren’t kidding when you said you pulled it apart.” Steve gives him an amused smile, voice light as he turns away from the door. Then he glances back at it, worry creasing his brow as he turns back to Tony. “You don’t mind me stayin’?”

Tumbling back into the bed and wriggling around until his comfortable again, Tony opens his eyes enough to glare at Steve, standing there in his pants that are still damp to the knee and shirt that he was part way through unbuttoning before he stopped. “Get in the bed, stupid.”

Steve’s shoulders sag in relief and he goes back to unbuttoning his shirt. Shutting his eyes again, Tony settles down against the pillows, half asleep by the time he hears the light flick off and the bed shifts as Steve crawls into it. He waits a few moments until the bed stops shifting and Steve gets comfortable, then promptly rolls over to face him and wriggles as close as he can. He stops just short of latching onto Steve and cuddling, trying to be content instead with just being close enough to breathe in the warm scent of leather and aftershave. He feels Steve go tense, then, when Tony doesn’t move further, he relaxes again. Tony jumps slightly when he feels the touch of fingertips against his temple. He worries for a moment that Steve’s going to pull away, but the fingertips linger there, hesitantly for a moment before they trail through his hair. He gives a sleepy smile, searching around with one hand until he finds Steve’s free hand, linking their fingers together, drifting off to sleep with Steve’s fingers brushing through his hair.

He dreams disjointed images and the relentless tolling of the church bell. He dreams of the water rushing towards him, it’s roar vicious, snarling and churning and wanting to devour everything in its path. He dreams of Steve’s hand being wrenched from his and watching in horror, useless, as the water drags Steve away from him.

He wakes up, on the far side of the bed, nearly falling out, too scared to breathe until he rolls over blinks into the darkness of the room, eyes adjusting enough that he can see Steve’s still sleeping form. He doesn’t hesitate to wriggle across to the other side of the bed, press himself up against Steve’s back and wrap an arm around his waist. He presses his face between Steve’s shoulder blades and sucks in a deep breath, willing his heart and mind to stop racing. There’s no water, they’re both safe.

It feels like hours before he drifts off to sleep again; all he can think about is getting them both out of this awful place and as far away from the drowned town as possible.

///

The rooms is filled with a weak, grey light when Tony opens his eyes again. It’s a deceptive kind of light, the sort that makes it impossible to guess what time of the day it is, and not for the first time, Tony wishes he still had his phone on him. Even if the lack of signal took away it’s primary functions, he could have done with the secondary uses, as a clock, a torch, an expensive paperweight. He’s moved again in the night, back to the side of the bed he’d initially claimed. Half scared to look, Tony lifts himself up enough to glance over his shoulder, relief washing through him when he sees that Steve is still there, still asleep. He watches his chest moving as he breathes for perhaps long enough to be considered creepy, but he can’t quite shake the fear from the nightmare he had.

It seems impossible that someone he only met days ago, if even that long, could be so important to him already. It isn’t as though Tony’s never had flings or one night stands, or even two or three night stands, but the thing about casual sex is that it’s casual, entirely based on lust, and once it’s over, it is a good or great memory, or something you forget entirely. Steve, though, Tony thinks while he looks at him, the slight frown between his eyebrows even as he sleep, Steve is something else entirely. A few days and Steve’s on a similar level to Rhodey or Pepper when it comes to important people in Tony’s life. He can’t imagine leaving this town without him, doesn’t even want to think about what will happen afterwards, when they do manage to escape and Steve goes on with his life. He might have plans for his life afterwards, plans that have no room for Tony, and he’s not sure he’s ready to face that idea. He’s never liked to admit that he can be clingy, but he knows that he is. It’s one of his many flaws, and he’s sure it’s only due to close proximity and necessity that Steve is even giving him the time of day. It must have been lonely for him, stuck here, best friend dead, only two other people to talk to, no wonder Steve even thought to talk to him, he was a new face, after all.

Flopping back against the pillow, Tony rubs at his face, groaning into the palm of his hand, sick of his own self pity. It didn’t serve a purpose, and until he managed to get them both out of this town, there was little need to worry about Steve leaving him. He can be selfish and indulge in the attention for a while longer. Deciding that he should be doing something useful with his time, but not keen on leaving the room while Steve is still asleep, since history showed that getting separated was an infinitely bad idea, he wriggles his hand under the mattress, extracting the journal. Propping himself up against the pillows a bit, he opens the cover, catching the keys as they slide out, flipping through the pages until he finds some of the later entries, where the handwriting is frantic and sloppy.

It is nearly incoherent, hard to discern exactly what the man had been writing about, it seems entirely like paranoid ramblings, the man writing about being watched, about having to find the treasure. He flips over another page, and stops, breathe freezing in his chest as he sees the words written on the page.

_How can this be? He’s supposed to be dead. How is he here watching me? He was supposed to have died in the flood. Either the reports must have been wrong, or this is some kind of spectre here to haunt me._

Heart thumping in his chest, Tony tries to suck in a breath, trying to squash down the panic the words induce. What is the man even talking about, he’s not quite sure he understands what it is he’s reading. Who could he have possibly seen that was meant to have died in the flood. He wishes, not for the first time, for his phone and an internet connection. If he had those two things, he could actually look up information on the town and the flood, and maybe then he’d know what the hell was going on and it wouldn’t all be guess work and speculation. He’s not sure what it is he needs to do, without any medical equipment, he can’t rule out that it might all be in his head. Without a phone, he can’t call for help. It’s just him, Steve, and a creepy, half submerged town. The feeling he got from the church tower, from the vision he’d had in the boat, is that he needs to go into the town. Usually he likes more evidence and equations behind things than just a gut feeling, but it’s all he has right now, so he’ll have to settle for that.

Swallowing thickly, Tony flips a few more pages over, but there aren’t any more entries after the one where the author claimed to have seen a dead person. He thumbs back through the pages until he finds the sketched diagrams of the dive suit and the surface supply gas compressor. It isn’t the most detailed, but he decides that it’s enough to work with. He can figure out the rest as he goes along, provided he can find the missing gauntlet. He reads through the entry besides the drawings, there’s a mention of the gauntlet needing some minor repairs, but not the extent of the damage, and there’s no mention of the hole in the suit. If the gauntlet was taken for repairs, Tony figures the best bet would be looking for it in the room above the pump station, where the skeleton was.

He had a course of action, a plan of attack, and that was a start.

Shutting the journal, he tucks the keys back in the cover and drops it onto the floor beside the bed. Settling back against the pillow, he rolls to his side and finds Steve lying there on his back, one hand resting on his chest, eyes open slightly and head turned to the side to watch Tony. He smiles sleepily when he sees Tony looking, lips curling up a fraction and the corners of his eyes creasing. The urge to kiss him is so much stronger than normal that Tony barely resists leaning closer, he clenches his fists against the sheets and stops himself from rocking forward.

“Morning, sweetheart.” He whispers into the space between them, feeling his heart clench a little, knowing that it’s in the pre-emptive loss of never having moments like this in the future.

Steve’s eyes open wide, his cheeks going red, smile turning from sleepy to shy without dissipating. “Good morning, Tony.”

Part of him wishes they could stay like this all morning, for as long as possible, but that isn’t plausible or in any way productive. Reaching out, he knocks his knuckles against Steve’s shoulder, then rolls back to other way and out of the bed. “C’mon, we’ve got a dive suit to fix, a sewer to explore and a town to escape from.”

As he heads for the bathroom and the clothes he’d dumped there the night before, Tony chances a look over his shoulder, to see if Steve’s moving or not. He has sat up on the edge of the bed, watching Tony with an expression that looks part melancholy and part the kind of steely resolve that is born from fear.

Steve’s face goes deliberately blank when he catches Tony looking, turning his face away and standing up, grabbing his shirt from where he hung it on the back of a chair, shrugging his way into and heading for the door. “I’ll go grab some food. You wait here, and then we’ll go.”

As Steve pushes the chest of drawers aside and leaves the room, Tony can’t help but feel like he’s done something wrong. He’s not sure if it’s the terms of endearment he keeps letting slip, or the fact that he keeps insisting that he has to go under the water. He gets dressed again, not quite able to shake the feeling that he’s upset Steve somehow, and then takes his time packing up the journal again and tucking it inside his jacket, keeping the keys secure. Just as he’s starting to get restless with waiting, has already compiled a list of all the things he need to get and do that day, and has paced the length of the room fifteen times the door swings open again and Steve stands there, a bag slung over his shoulder and a plate with a sandwich on it in one hand. He holds the sandwich out to Tony, frowning slightly when he sees that the bed has been made and the mess Tony had made the day before with the door handle had been cleaned up.

Tony reaches for the sandwich, knowing there’s no point denying his body the nutrients it needs, and there have been no adverse porcine side effects. Sticking one half of the sandwich in his mouth he offers the plate and the other half back to Steve, who shakes his head. Chewing, Tony narrows his eyes in challenge, gesturing the plate towards Steve again, who shakes his head again.

When he keeps holding the plate out, Steve pushes it back towards him, looking rather sheepish as he shrugs, glancing around the room. “I ate in the kitchen, while I was getting everything organised.”

Shrugging, Tony takes the other half of the sandwich and stuffs it in his mouth, setting the plate down on the chest of drawers by the door. “You’re loss.” He mumbles around a mouthful of bread.

Giving him a bemused frown, Steve slings the bag off his shoulder and rifles through it for a while, pulling something out of it and holding out an insulated flask to Tony. He doesn’t even get a chance to say anything before Tony has snatched it out of his hands, unscrewed the lid and sculled half the contents in a couple mouthfuls. Steve stares at him, eyes wide, looking slightly horrified. “That was hot.”

Screwing the lid back on, Tony tucks the flask into a jacket pocket, shrugging non-committally and starts towards the door. “Time’s a wasting, my dear, we should really try and crack this case and get out of here.”

Slinging the bag back over his shoulder, Steve follows, catching up with Tony at the top of the stairs. Their hands knock together as they descend to the ground floor, Tony laces their fingers together, and tugs Steve in the direction of the reception desk, aiming for the basement. “I need to grab my tools before we go too far, and need to make a stop by my car too.”

They retrieve Tony’s toolbox from the generator room, then make the journey back through the forest to the car, where Tony rummages around in the boot for a while before coming up with a puncture repair kit and spar jerry-can of petrol that he carried with him on road trips, just in case. On a whim, he spends about ten minutes stripping parts from beneath the car bonnet, belts, spark plugs, anything that he thinks could be useful. He can’t find a torch at all, an oversight on his part, though he doubts it would have been much help anyway, given that he doubted he had something that would have had a sufficient waterproof rating to take with him into the town. The closer they get to the town and the pump station, the more withdrawn Steve seems, stoically silent, looking around as though he’s expecting an ambush. He holds onto Tony’s hand tightly, the toolbox tucked under his other arm.

The pump station looks exactly the same as it had the last time they where there, though Tony can’t shake the feeling that something is a little off about the place, a difference so subtle he doesn’t notice, but something unnerving about it. It could just be that he knows there’s a dead body in the room he needs to search, the body of a paranoid mad man, who thought dead men were out to get him. It was disconcerting to say the least. Deciding to put it off a little longer, Tony heads for the sewer first, dropping off the toolbox and puncture kit. Steve watches him carefully as he unpacks the puncture kit and surveys the contents, moving between it and the dive suit several times, before letting out a frustrated breath and marching towards the stairs.

“We’ve got to find the missing gauntlet, and a lantern of some sort. But all of that is a moot point if I can’t get the gas compressor to work, which is all a moot point if there’s still holes in the suit and a missing piece.” He gets to the base of the stairs, then turns sharply and starts back to the compressor.

Steve intercepts him part way with a hand on his shoulder, pulling him to an abrupt halt. “Breathe, Tony.” He levels him with a look, waiting a moment while Tony sucks in a breath and stops fidgeting quite so much. “You start on the compressor. I’ll duck upstairs and have a look around for the other gauntlet, and a lantern of some sort.”

Tony feels a nervous energy jitter beneath his skin, heart rate increasing to a near panic at the idea of Steve leaving the room, but he forces himself to nod, swallowing the thickness in this throat, because it makes more sense, it’s a better use of their time. “Okay, just, you know, be careful.”

Casting a glance at the flooded sewer, Steve nods, jaw clenching and teeth grinding together. “You too.”

The grip on his shoulder tightens before it falls away, and Tony allows himself a moment to watch Steve start back up the metal stairs before turning around to eye the dive suit and the compressor, trying to decide which to tackle first. As his gaze skates across the murky, dark surface of the water, Tony thinks that maybe Steve would rather spend time in a room with a dead body than he would spend any more time around the water, he really hadn’t seemed very keen on it the first time they were here, or in the boat. Pushing the thought aside, he shrugs off Steve’s jacket, setting it aside and rolls up the sleeves of his shirt. There seems little point in trying to get the compressor working if he can’t mend the hole in the suit.

It takes more effort than he thought it would to get the suit down from where it’s hanging and get the torso spread out enough that he has a chance to get a patch on it. He scrubs at the area surrounding the hole with the little wire brush from the kit, abrading the surface so the glue will have something to stick to. Cleaning the area, he spreads the glue over it and waits until it had partially dried before he smooths the patch over and stitches it down with the roller. Inspecting his handiwork, Tony decides to repeat the process on the inside of the suit too, just to be safe, before thoroughly inspecting the rest of the suit for holes.

While he works, he listens to the floorboards above him creak, tracking Steve’s movements subconsciously as he moves around the room upstairs searching. By the time he hears the door scraping closed again, and the clang of footsteps on the metal staircase, Tony is elbow deep in the compressor. He lifts his head enough to watch Steve appear in the door way, then ducks his head back down to keep working, peering through the gloom to try and see what he’s doing.

There’s a sudden light cast over the compressor in front of him, illuminating what he’s working on. Tony blinks against the sudden brightness, glancing over his shoulder and nearly knocking his nose against the source of the light. It’s a torch of some kind, round and flat, and held carefully in one of Steve’s hands, hovering just over his shoulder. In his other hand he holds something that looks encouragingly like the missing gauntlet. Flicking his gaze up to Steve’s face, he sees him smiling, a little too grim to be truly happy.

“Happy hunting then, I guess?” Tony asks, turning his attention back to the compressor, reminding himself that the sooner he gets it fixed, the sooner he can get in the water to explore the town and the sooner he can get Steve as far away enough away from the water to stop him from looking so worried and pale. He feels guilty just for bringing him back down here, when he had been able to tell last time that there was some sort of underlying fear there for Steve. He finally gets the spark plug undone, extracting it from the socket and giving it a quick wipe over with a rag.

Fitting it back into the lead, he shifts his attention back to Steve. “Can you do me a favour, dear? Flick that torch off, and see that pull cord there, yeah, there, give that a pull for me. Nothing vicious, we don’t hate it yet.”

The room drops back into darkness as Steve follows Tony’s directions. The pull cord sticks a bit, but eventually the pulley rolls over smoothly and Steve pulls the cord out to it’s full length. There’s the tiniest flicker of a spark on the spark plug in Tony’s hand.

“Is that what you wanted?” Steve asks carefully, voice sounding strained. As soon as Tony hums in confirmation, he takes a step back away from the railing, and the light flickers on again.

Fitting the spark plug back in place, Tony checks the fuel lines again, still supple enough. Turning the fuel on, and choking the engine, he pushes himself to his feet and wraps one hand around the pull cord handle. Glancing over his shoulder, he grins at Steve. “Okay, fingers crossed. Here goes.”

Nothing happens the first few attempts. On the fifth attempt the engine splutters, but fails to turn over. Tony considers trying to pull it all apart again and seeing if there’s something he missed. Try six and seven return the same results, by attempt eleven his shoulder starts to ache, leaving him wishing he’d stuck to the workout routine Happy had put together for him, rather than just relying on the physical work he does in the workshop to keep him fit. He’s about to give up and pull the whole motor apart again, when the engine splutters, and coughs into life. It roars, echoing around the cavernous sewer, drowning out his relieved whoop of triumph, he waits for the motor pitch to start sounding strained, and eases the choke off again carefully, until the motor is purring nicely. He gives the air a curious sniff, but other than the damp smell of the sewer and the tang of the petrol he spilt while trying to refuel the motor, the air is relatively free of exhaust fumes, which he takes to mean that the exhaust pipe leading away from the motor and up the wall to outside, must be clear and sound.

Crouching back down in front of the compressor, Tony flicks the switch on, listening to pitch of the motor change once there is a load on it. The pressure gauges start to move, rising higher the longer the compressor is on, until they settle. Tony watches them for a moment longer, then carefully unrolls the length of hose attached to the compressor. Placing his hand over the end, he can feel the air being pushed out the hose. He gives it a curious sniff, getting a nose full of stale air, which makes his cough. Dropping the hose, he leaves the motor running as he turns to face Steve, who’s standing there, gauntlet tucked under his arm so he can press his right hand to his ear.

Getting closer, so he can be heard over the noise of the motor, Tony carefully takes the gauntlet from Steve, giving it a thorough look over. “We’re making progress.” He raises his voice and offers Steve a smile, getting a grim, slightly ill look in return.

By the time Tony has the gauntlet fitted back onto the dive suit, and has connected the air hose to the helmet, the air supply is running clear, and the pressure gauges are all within, what Tony hopes, is an acceptable range. Getting into the dive suit is trickier than he thought it might have been, it’s bigger and baulkier than any wet suit he’s worn before, and requires him to strips right down to his underwear and shirt, which just makes him extra wary of any spiders that might be lurking about inside the suit. Steve helps him, looking grim the entire time, getting paler the more time passes. As he’s fixing the dive torch to the front of the suit, Tony can make out sweat beading on the top of his lip, and across his forehead, despite how cool it is inside the sewer. He wants to reach out, to offer some sort of comfort, but he knows that it’s his fault Steve’s even in this situation.

“Hey.” He catches Steve’s gaze and holds it for a long time, trying to offer an encouraging smile. “It’s okay.”

Steve’s jaw clenches, nostrils flaring as he breathes harshly. “It’s not. If something goes wrong.” He stops, looking away, Adam’s Apple bobbing as his swallows. “If something goes wrong while you’re down there, Tony, I won’t be able to save you.”

 _Thinks he needs to save us all._ He can hear Natasha’s words echoing in side his head, and for the first time, he thinks he gets it. Stuck in the town for who knows how long, with only two other people, Steve must have been hell bent on getting them all out. Just, without success. Offering a smile, Tony reaches up, able to do little more than awkwardly pat at Steve’s chest with one gauntleted hand. Turning slightly, he picks up the helmet, touching a hand to the air supply hose and the cable that runs alongside it. “See this here? This is the umbilical cord. At any point, you should just be able to haul me back up by this. So, if any thing does go wrong, which, knock on wood, it won’t, you can save me.”

Steve still looks unsure, but he takes the helmet from Tony’s hands, fitting it over his head and wriggling it until it’s seated properly. He fiddles around with the join for a while, until he drops his hands away and takes a slight step back.

Taking a few experimental breathes of the cool air being pushed into the suit, satisfied that he is getting sufficient oxygen, Tony grins at Steve through the slightly murky glass, raises his voice to compensate for the extra layer. “Besides, it’s just one step at a time. I might get in the water and discover that this isn’t waterproof and then it will all be game over, man.”

The tension behind Steve’s eyes increases, so Tony quickly amends. “For the suit, not for me. Baby steps. Here, now help me into the water.”

Getting into the water is a little awkward, the suit is definitely more cumbersome on land than anything Tony’s had experience with before, but once he’s settling into the water and it takes some of the weight of the suit, he’s surprised at how much it eases the movement. Also surprising is the fact that there aren’t any water leaks. Looking at Steve, who stands on the ledge above him, the umbilical cord held loosely in his hands, Tony gives him a thumbs up, before moving forward and into the sewer tunnels, the water level getting deeper.

He really hopes that it isn’t the last time he’ll see Steve.

Once the water is over his head, Tony is grateful for the torch they found, but even that is struggling to illuminate very far. He moves along the sewer tunnels slowly, being careful where he’s placing his feet, the first junction he comes to, he takes the tunnel that seems to be getting lower. Belatedly he thinks he should have tried to find some sort of map, had more of a plan, but he’d been so wrapped up in getting the compressor and the suit working, and had gotten a little carried away on the test run. In lieu of not knowing exactly where he’s going, he sticks to the main tunnel, ignoring all the smaller inlets that join it, and keeps going down. When he expects that he’s gone about half as far as he can on the umbilical, he comes to a T-junction and the tunnel branches off into two different directions. On the wall in front of him there’s a ladder leading up to a manhole. Navigating the ladder in the suit is a little difficult, but he manages to climb to the top, there he braces one arm against the manhole cover and pushes it up and over to one side, a task that he’s sure would have been a lot harder if it wasn’t for the weightlessness effect of water.

Climbing up through the manhole, Tony finds himself on a street, weak sunlight illuminating buildings lining either side, a car that had been parked on the side of the road outside what looks like it might have been a general store, tipped at a forty five degree angle and resting against a rotting verandah post. The car boot has popped open, or perhaps was left open before the flood hit, it’s impossible to tell; everything is covered in a layer of mud and sediment, each footstep displacing it as he walks. Heading for the car, Tony gives it a curious once over, peering in through the missing windscreen, but there are no obvious signs that anyone had been in there at the time of the flood. Not that he can imagine someone willingly leaving a car behind, in an evacuation.

Moving towards the car boot, Tony pushes the lid open more, reaching into the mud and sediment and feeling around within it. At first he thinks there’s nothing, then his gauntleted fingers catch on something. Scratching the mud away, Tony manages to produce the edge of a wooden case. Extracting it from the mud, Tony discovers that while the front is locked, the screws from the hinges at the back had rusted and pulled out of the wood. Pushing the lid aside reveals the nearly pristine interior of the case, sealed enough to keep out mud. Inside the case is lined with fabric, starting to rot and tear in places, and sitting on the fabric are two items, one is another key, similar to the other three Tony has already found, the other is a badge of some sort, an eight pointed star, with detailing that Tony can’t quite make out through the glass of the helmet. He tucks both items into one of the small pockets of the dive suit.

Moving back over to the manhole, Tony glances around, trying to get his bearings. The street runs in two directions from the manhole; on one side it continues for quite a while, buildings down either side, and on the other, beyond the general store, there isn’t much, except the road continuing beyond the edge of the buildings, starting to wind its way up an incline. Turning to take in the rest of the town, Tony can make out the dark shape of the church in the opposite direction, reaching right up to above the waterline. Using that as a point of reference, Tony guesses that the incline in the opposite direction must be the road that leads up to the pier below the hotel. There’s nothing there that he can’t explore from the surface, so he turns back towards the rest of the town, heading along the street.

The church looms closer, but judging the distance, Tony isn’t sure he’ll quite reach it before the umbilical reaches its limits. There’s only one was to find out though, Tony decides. Part way to the church a large building off to one side catches his attention. It’s a huge house, grandiose unlike the rest of the town and something about it feels familiar, calling his attention. The last run in he had with Schmidt resurfaces in his mind, what he’d said about the rotten mayor, his wife and his suspicious death.

He thinks of Natasha, grieving over a grave that didn’t belong to her husband. Of the vision he head of a dead man slumped over a chessboard. The way he just knew that it had been the mayor and the shadows he’d seen had belonged to Natasha and her young lover. He doubts there is any proof in the building, who knew how long before the flood it had even happened. More to the point, he’s not sure that he wants to find proof. What good will come of accusing a grief confused lady like Natasha of murdering her husband. It isn’t even like he trusts Schmidt one iota, so listening to his suspicions about the mayor’s death.

Still, it seems ridiculous to have come this far and not explore as much as he can. It might be that the only way out of this creepy town is to uncover all its secrets.

Mind made up, Tony enters the house, hoping that the whole thing doesn’t just fall down on top of him. Most of the ground floor is a mess, furniture thrown around, and sediment built up over the years. The stairs to the second floor have collapsed, banister listing to one side and half the steps having rotted through, ruling out any chance of exploring the second floor. Slogging his way through the ground floor, keeping track of where he’s been and making sure he doesn’t cross back over the umbilical at any point. There’s a door just beyond the living room, slightly ajar, that feels exceptionally familiar. Approaching it slowly, Tony pushes the door carefully, keeping back from the door frame in case it falls in on him. It holds and the door opens to expose a room, a room that he’s seen before. Somehow, it appears mostly untouched by the flood, the usual detritus is scattered around, but it looks like someone had been through and straightened up the furniture.

There’s a chess table in the centre of the room, devoid of any pieces. Against the back wall there’s a writing desk, the lid jammed half way open, several items scattered around on top of it, covered in sediment. There are frames hanging askew on the walls, the painting in them damaged, warped and rotting away.

Approaching the writing desk, Tony shuffled through some of the items there, paper that disintegrates as he disturbed it, until the gauntlet catches on the hard edge of something that doesn’t instantly fall apart. Once he wipes the layer of sediment off of the surface, Tony finds himself staring at a familiar face, deep red hair framing delicate features. The tin print painted photograph shows Natasha, sitting in a chair, a man standing beside her, one hand settled on her shoulder. Tony isn’t sure how old the photo must be, it’s surprising that it even lasted this long, surely only due to the fact it’s mounted on metal. Natasha looks younger, if the image is a true depiction and hasn’t been made up. The man, older looking, the kind of smarmy that makes Tony shudder inside his dive suit. The Mayor, at a guess.

“Happy couple.” He mumbles sarcastically under his breath, voice sounding too loud inside the helmet. Turning away from the image, Tony focuses on the remainder of the desk. Brushing aside some of the silt that has settled there, through the swirling cloud of dirt, Tony sees three chess pieces. The black queen, standing, while at her feet lie the white king and a single black pawn. The same three chess piece he’d seen in his visions, but they’re in a different location, and this time the pawn is dead too. He can’t help thinking about the grave Natasha was at, or the fact that both she and Steve grieved over the same man. There’s something there, in that, something that is all a part of the town’s secrets, he just has to figure out what. Behind the chess pieces, tucked back into one of the recesses of the writing desk is a small glass bottle with a cork stopper. It’s hard to determine the colour of the glass in the murky light and through the sediment, but it appears to be octagonal in shape. Somewhere in the back of his mind, Tony thinks he knows what it contains, but he can’t quite recall the knowledge or remember why he knows it. Carefully he picks to the bottle and tucks it into a pocket of the suit, hoping it doesn’t break before he gets back up the surface.

As he reached for the bottle, his hand disturbed more sediment, sweeping a clear path through it across the desk. Beneath the layer mud, there’s a piece of paper, thick and heavy looking like quality letter writing paper. Somehow, perhaps protected by the sediment, Tony isn’t sure, the paper is mostly intact and the words written on it are still legible, for most part. The handwriting, though bleeding around the edges, is a beautiful cursive, delicate curls to letters, that just reminds him again of his mother. Fumbling at his chest he angles the light towards the paper, peering through the murky glass and water.

_... arest James, please forgive me. I never intended for this to happen. I only wanted to be rid of... never meant for you to die too._

The next few lines are written in another language, and entirely different alphabet, possible Russian, but Tony isn’t really sure. He can’t read it, and he doubts there is any way that he can move the page and keep it intact. It fits with what he thinks the bottle might have contained. With the story that Schmidt told, the guilt he alluded to. Natasha killed her husband, for whatever reason, and Steve’s friend, a man besotted with Natasha, had taken the fall for the murder. Wistfully he wishes he had an underwater camera, some way to record the letter as it is, something he could use to show Steve what he found. He just had to hope that Steve would believe him.

Investigating further seems pointless, he’s not sure what else he can find to prove what happened. The body is long gone, and even if it wasn’t they’re missing the autopsy facilities and expertise to prove anything anyway.

Retracing his steps, Tony exits the building, starting to turn back towards the manhole when he pauses, looking at the looming shape of the church. On the water, he’d felt like there was something important about the church, something that was linked into all the towns secrets. Going with his gut instinct, he heads towards the church, picking his way around the detritus and broken down buildings.

Through the water the church comes into focus; it’s a simple building, wooden boards with peeling, once white, paint. The double doors at the front are open, one floating in the water, tethered by one hinge. Approaching the church, Tony starts to feel a little unnerved; there’s something about it that feels like it’s both compelling him to investigate, and also to stay away. He stands back in the street a bit, looking up at the church, and all he can think about is his vision of the person running into the church and the flood water rolling in on top of him. For a second he can’t breathe, all he can feel is the weight of the water pressing down on him, trying to keep him stuck in the town. Through the murky water, he can remember the vision of something drifting down towards him, without even thinking about it, he finds himself reaching up, but there’s nothing there to grab.

Forcing himself to breath, Tony reminds himself that he’s in a dive suit, that he isn’t drowning, and that the flood happened a while ago. How long, he had no idea, but it had happened in the past. He takes another step towards the church, then another; the feeling of drowning doesn’t return. Something catches on his foot when he’s almost there, skittering through the mud, sending up an explosion of sediment. Bending down the best he can, Tony scoops up the item he kicked, bringing it up with a handful of mud. As the mud drifts away, he finds himself holding a chain with a couple of discs hanging off of it. He can’t make out the details, but there is something unnervingly familiar about them, something that makes him think he’s seen them before. He tries rubbing a thumb over one of the discs, clearing away the grime and rust that covers it. Through the murky water and the stained glass of the dive helmet, Tony thinks he can make out the name _Steven G Rogers_ stamped into the metal, but before he can make out the rest, it feels like the world shakes.

Looking up, Tony watches as the church rattles and shakes, bits breaking off of it. The door breaks loose, drifting off. From within the building, a tangled mass of reeds starts to appear, growing and spreading, pushing out the broken windows, knocking the remaining door off of its hinges. Tony staggers back a step, tightening his hold on the chain in his hand. Everything goes still, unnaturally calm where moments before everything had been shaking. Tony tries to breathe, but it feels like the weight of the water is suffocating him. He takes another step back, starts to turn, making sure he doesn’t tangle him self in the umbilical line.

Just as the starts to turn, he sees it, the flurry of movement from the church as the reed spill out the windows and down into the street, growing at a rapid rate, writhing their way through the water towards him. Throwing his arms out, trying to keep his balance, Tony walks backwards, but every step he takes, the reeds only seem to move faster. Panicking, he turns around and hurries back long the street, trying to collect the umbilical up as he goes, not wanting to get it hooked on anything. The faster he tries to move, the more it feels like something is trying to drag him back.

The manhole is in sight, but Tony’s tripping and stumbling, the reeds catching at his legs and arms and tugging on the umbilical, trying to pull it out of his helmet. It wants him to die down there, under water, in a creepy town, so far away from Rhodey’s house where he should be. Beneath the panic, all his can think is that he lied to Steve. He told him he’d be alright, that there was nothing to worry about, and instead he is going to die, while Steve is waiting for him to come back with answers.

Somehow he slips down the manhole, falling into the sewer when he can’t get his hands to catch the ladder. He lands, falls forward, feels the reeds grab him and pin him down. Distantly, he thinks about his dream, of Steve’s hand being ripped out his by the force of the flood. Except, this time it’s him, pulled down under the water and never able to reach Steve. The reeds are wrapping around his helmet now, blacking out what little light there was, working their way beneath the seal on the helmet, creeping inside the suit and wrapping around his chest, tightening until he can’t breathe. They press into his mouth, his nose, into his eyes. He can feel them wrap around his throat, until he’s gasping uselessly, pawing at them, trying to push them away.

Something tugs at him, lurching him roughly across the ground, but still the reeds try and hold him back, keep him down, try to keep him there forever. The world lurches again, spins and spins, he feels like he’s being tossed around in side the sewer, hitting every wall, every ledge, every support. He feels rattled and broken, ground into dust when the world lurches again and he hits something, smashes into it and stays there.

The helmet comes off, he panics scrabbling to try and keep it on, but cool air washes over his sweaty skin instead of water, and finally he can breathe. He sucks in lungful after lungful of air as the world spins and the reeds slither away back into the water. He’s so preoccupied with getting oxygen back to his brain that he doesn’t realise the deep, hacking, lung expelling coughs he can hear aren’t coming from him. He tries to prop himself up, but his arms wobble and shake and refuse to hold him. Rolling, he tilts his head enough that he can see Steve, dripping wet, on his hands and knees, coughing up and spitting out dirty, brown water that comes with a strong sent of bile.

“Steve?” He croaks, voice barely audible over the coughing.

Steve doesn’t look up, just keeps coughing, until his arms give out and he collapses to the side, curling into the foetal position. Vaguely, Tony notices that he’s shaking, skin so pale it’s almost translucent. He looks blue in the low light. Despite the world still spinning, Tony focuses long enough to unlatch the gauntlets and push them off, struggling to get the dive suit off, managing to fight his way out of the torso and then crawl across the stone floor to Steve, leaving the pants behind.

“Steve? Fuck, Steve. You weren’t meant to drink it!” Skirting the puddle of water and vomit, Tony collapses beside Steve, grabbing him and hauling him up onto his chest. Steve shakes against him, barely uncurling, just trembles and shivers and looks dangerously blue.

“Steve, come on, don’t do this to me. I’m not going to let you die just because you tried to save me. Come on, nice deep breaths for me, in and out.” He rubs his hands against Steve’s arms, his chest, wherever he can reach, feeling his own clothes soaking up the water dripping off of Steve’s. He keeps talking, keeps rambling, counting breaths as Steve slowly stops gasping and starts breathing more regularly.

Still shaking, Steve’s body seems to unlock, relax a fraction. He sucks in a breath, coughs once, and whispers something that sounds close to, “I think I drowned.”

Frowning, Tony’s sure he didn’t hear right. He presses a hand to Steve’s forehead, sweeps his hair back from his face, kisses the back to Steve’s head, not even caring that he gets putrid water in his mouth. “What was that sweetheart?”

Steve hiccups, a small hitching sound that jerks his whole body, then falls still again. For a moment he doesn’t respond, but when he does his voice is stronger. “I thought you were going to drown. The motor stopped and I couldn’t get it going again. I couldn’t pull you back fast enough. Then the line got tangled. I thought I’d lost you.”

He remembers the reeds, rapid growing and trying to drag him down, keep him there. Figments of his oxygen deprived state, he’s sure, hallucinations once his body realised something was wrong, even if his brain hadn’t told him what yet. Pressing his lips to the back of Steve’s head again, he tries to push the memory, the panic, to the back of his mind. “Technically I wasn’t drowning, I was asphyxiating.”

Steve lets out another hiccup that sounds suspiciously like a sob and Tony knows he said the wrong thing. Soothing one hand over Steve chest, while the other keeps pushing hs hair back away from his face, Tony mumbles and apology, humming the disjointed tune he half remembers Natasha singing. Steve relaxes in increments, until he’s just trembling slightly, the violent shivering mostly gone.

When he finally seems to have settled, Tony presses another kiss to the back of his head. “I’m sorry, sweetheart. And thank you. Thank you for saving me.”

There’s a slight hitch to Steve’s breathe as he closes a hand around the one on his chest and squeezes tightly. “I almost didn’t. Tony. Jesus, I couldn’t bear it if you died.”

He tries not to think about it, the reeds, the panic, how heavy the water had felt. He moves slightly, rolls enough he can prop himself up on one shoulder, enough to see Steve’s face, the tight lines and pale skin. He doesn’t look quite so blue any more though, which Tony counts as a win. Leaning down, he presses his lips just behind Steve’s ear, lingering there for a long moment, breathing in the scent of warm leather and aftershave, covered over by the damp, wet smell of the sewer. When he draws back, he notices the flush of colour high on Steve’s cheek and the red tinge to the shell of his ear, the way the tight press of his lips has slackened slightly. He wants to kiss him, thinks that if there was ever a moment where he might be able to excuse it, it is right then.

He can’t bring himself to do it though, partially out of fear of rejection, but mostly because Steve’s lying there with his eyes shut, still shivering, and it feels too close to taking advantage of his current state. Slumping back against the stone floor, Tony glances around the cavernous room, at the silent motor, the untidy heap of the umbilical where Steve had hauled it out of the water, the discarded dive suit. He can’t even imagine the strength it would have taken to haul him, plus the dive suit out of the water. No wonder Steve had swallowed so much water in the process.

Steve gives a more violent shudder, bringing Tony back to the present, and making his aware of the fact that he’s starting to get cold, the water from Steve’s clothes soaking into his own and the stone floor sapping any little bit of body heat out of him. He smooths his hand through Steve’s hair one last time before trying to push himself up off of the floor. Steve clings to his hand, not letting go until Tony gently pries his fingers away, extracting his hand, and managing to get up onto his knees. Steve blinks owlishly up at him, eyes wide and slightly panicked.

Gripping his shoulder, Tony tries to offer a reassuring smile. “Come on, big fella, we should get back to the hotel and get you changed into something dry. Don’t want you catching a cold.”

Frowning, Steve looks down at himself, like he’s only just noticed that he’s wet, then he looks up at Tony again, reaching one shaking hand out to touch the damp front of his shirt.

“Yeah, me too, buddy.” Shrugging, Tony clambers to his feet, reaching down to grab the hand that Steve had in the air, giving it a tug. “Come on, I’m getting cold.”

That seems to spur Steve back into action. He staggers to his feet, gripping tightly to Tony’s hand as he wobbles a bit finding his feet. When he’s upright, he turns to Tony, moving his hand from his to his shoulder. “We should get back to the hotel.” He echoes Tony’s words, frowning slightly as he looks around the room, eyes settling on the discarded dive suit.

Propping Steve up against the wall, he ducks out of his hold, and heads back the dive suit, picking up the items he’d found under the water, tucking them into his pockets to have a look at later, when he had better light and Steve doesn’t look quite so close to falling down. Moving back over to Steve, he slings one of his arms over his shoulders, giving him a moment to steady before they start heading to the stairs.

The walk from the town back to the hotel is gruelling; by the time they reach the top of the hill before the forest, Tony feels like he’s one lung short, no doubt a side effect of his oxygen deprivation, and Steve’s shivering more violently keeps listing to the side. They make it, how Tony isn’t really sure, writing it off as a mixture of pig headedness and desperation, but they finally stagger into Steve’s room. It takes a little prompting to get Steve into the bathroom, since he is determined to just collapse on the bed, but once Tony has him in there, and the shower running, steam billowing out from behind the curtain, Steve seems to understand what Tony wants him to do and starts stripping off his wet clothes.

Turning his back, Tony tries not to fixate on the pale expanse of Steve’s back that he’d seen, and heads back into the bedroom, shutting the door behind him. He busies himself with finding a dry shirt for himself, and wrapping himself back in Steve’s jacket, pulling it tight around his chest like a security blanket. Listening to the shower still running, comforted by the fact that he hasn’t heard any loud thumps or any noises that might have suggested Steve had collapsed, Tony looks over the items he found underwater.

The key, though rusty, looks like it is a matching partner for those he’s already found, so he lines them up carefully on the bed side table. Four keys to match the four locks in the door on the way to the basement. Next is the octagonal bottle with the cork stopper. The label is long gone, but there’s a section embossed in print that reads _NOT FOR CONSUMPTION._ Deciding against attempting to remove the cork, Tony sets the bottle aside for later scrutiny. That leaves him with two items, the eight pointed star and the chain. The star is some sort of a pin, the metal tarnished over the years, and the face of it crusted with mud. Scrubbing aside the dirt with his thumb, Tony nearly drops the pin when he clears it enough to reveal what adorns the surface. printed into the front of the pin is a swastika.

He sets it down, not sure what to make of it. It looks like some sort of war medal, but his World Ward Two history is a little rusty, especially on the Nazi side of things. It had been in that wooden box, like some sort of collectors item that was accidentally left behind, so there was possibly a perfectly reasonable reason as to why it was in the town; however, it had been in the same box as the fourth key. The fourth key to the secret room in the basement, which Tony strong suspected belonged to Schmidt. Maybe it was some sort of family heirloom, something that Schmidt had inherited from a parent or grandparent.

Nudging it over to sit with the bottle and the key, Tony turns his attention to the chain, picking it up carefully to examine the discs hanging off of it. It looks like military dog tags, but they look different from Rhodey’s, older somehow. He scratches at the surface of one of the discs, scraping rust and dirt away until it reveals more of the stamped print on it. Beneath the name, there is a line of numbers that don’t make any sense to Tony, followed by _T42 O_. There’s nothing else on them except for a single _P_ stamped in the bottom corner. The second tag shows exactly the same print.

The bathroom door opens, catching Tony by surprised, so wrapped up in studying things that he didn’t hear the shower shut off. He glances over his shoulder as Steve exits the bathroom, towel wrapped around his waist, skin pink from the heat of the shower. His face is still rather blank, eyes dim as he crosses the room to the chest of drawers and starts pulling clothes out of the drawers. Tony turns back to his collection of items, staring pointedly at the dog tags, so he isn’t tempted to look around while Steve is getting dressed.

“Feeling better?” He asks, voice sounding a little strangled, but he doesn’t want to admit that.

Steve gives a grunt in response, which could have been a confirmation or a disagreement, Tony isn’t sure. After a few moments, he settles onto the bed beside Tony, shoulders slumped and head hanging down. “Barely.” He mumbles, his whole body shuddering with a shiver.

Not thinking too much about it, Tony loops an arm around Steve’s shoulders and pulls him closer, hoping that he can offer a bit of body warmth. Steve hums, low in his throat, sounding appreciative, then he straightens up a little, tilting his chin towards the bed side table. “What have you got there?”

Tony shrugs, slightly awkward since his arm is still drape over Steve’s shoulders. “Just a few things that I picked up under water. Found the last key, I think, and that pin in the boot of an old car that must have been left behind in the flood.”

Steve’s face creases and the eyes the pin with distaste. “Looks like a German Cross. Bravery medal, I think. Or exceptional non-combat efforts.”

“Bit of a history buff are you?” He asks, squeezing his hand over Steve’s shoulder.

Steve’s jaw tenses, but he nods stiffly. “You could say that. Don’t know why they’d be in town though.”

“Family heirloom, perhaps?” Tony offers in way of explanation, but he’s only guessing himself. “Speaking of, found these too.”

He reaches out and picks up the dog tags, holding the disc so Steve can read what’s on them. Beneath his arm, Steve goes still, not even breathing, the colour draining from his face again. One hand reaches up to close around the front of his shirt, clutching something beneath the fabric, against his chest.

“Where’d you find those?” Swallowing thickly, Steve’s voice is barely above a whisper when he speaks, sounding oddly strangled.

“Near the church?” He’s not sure why it comes out as a question, however, as he says the words Steve’s hand clenches tighter around the front of his shirt, shoulders forming a tense line. “I thought they might have belonged to whoever it was that died in the flood, but they look a lot older than that, not that I’m any sort of a military buff, but they just seem, older. Maybe they were lost prior to the flood and were unearthed during it?”

Steve’s shoulders jerk slightly, and when he speaks, his words are clipped and tense. “No one died in the flood, Tony. What’s the bottle about?”

Taking the bait and allowing Steve to change the topic, Tony reaches out towards the bottle, picking it up and bringing it closer. He’s not sure how to talk about this, how to tell Steve that he thinks Natasha killed her husband and Bucky took the fall for it. Though that last part is largely due to what Schmidt told him, if he can even be trusted. Taking a bracing breath, Tony holds the bottle out in front of Steve.

Steve frowns at the bottle for a moment, and the in a flurry of movement he sits bold upright, snatches the bottle out of Tony’s hand and deposits it back on the bedside table as far away as possible. He turns to glare at Tony, but there is an undercurrent of concern there. “Don’t got playing around with that. And whatever you do, don’t open it.”

Feeling a little lost, Tony glances between the bottle and Steve’s worried expression a few times, besides the embossed, ambiguous warning on the side, the bottle looks unassuming and mostly harmless. “You know what it is?”

Nodding again, wipes his hands against his pants, as though that would be enough to remove traces of whatever was in the bottle. “It’s strychnine. I don’t know how effective it’ll still be, having been underwater, but that cork could have sealed well enough, and I’d rather not having you getting a face full of it and finding out that way how poisonous it still is.”

Giving the bottle a bewildered look, specifically the embossed writing on the side, Tony mirrors Steve’s action of wiping his hands on his pants. “For strychnine, you’d think they’d have afforded a warning a little more dire than ‘not for consumption’. How old must this thing be, if they didn’t think to stamp a ‘poisonous’ on the side? They could have had a skull and crossbones at the very least.”

He’s rambling, nervously, he knows, but he can’t help it.

Steve just shrugs, glaring at the bottle like it offended him personally. “Old, I guess. Where’d you even find it?”

There’s no way out of it, not that Tony can see, not without blatantly lying to Steve in the process. “I found it in a big house, huge, grand thing. Some of the, um, visions that I’ve been having were of inside that house, in a particular room. Well, I found that room, and I found the bottle in that room.”

Steve’s Adam’s Apple bobs as he swallows, eyes going a little unfocused, no longer glaring at the bottle. “What were the visions?”

“A dead man, some overly symbolic chess pieces, and the shadows of two people. That’s the quick and ugly version, anyway.” Pausing, Tony watches Steve’s face for any signs of distress, but it’s still carefully blank. Deciding to just get it over with, he forges ahead. “There’s something that Schmidt said, and a few things that Natasha said that sort of line up, I don’t know, I’m just guessing for most part. But there was a painted photograph in the house, of a man. And Natasha. But I think. I think Natasha killed her husband, who was the mayor.”

Steve shakes his head, a slow, unsteady movement, as his face gets even paler, lips pressed tight together. He blinks rapidly, looks away from Tony as his hands clench to fists against his thighs. “Bucky killed the mayor. Pierce. He wasn’t a good man, was a terrible husband to Natasha. Bucky loved her, wanted to protect her. So he killed Pierce.”

Reaching out carefully Tony closes his had around Steve’s wrist, rubbing his thumb against his skin. “No, I think. I think Natasha killed him, and Bucky took the blame.”

Steve shakes his head more violently, covering his face with one hand, and shifting his other so he’s holding Tony’s hand, fingers clenching tightly. “No. He said. He swore to me that he did it. Why would he lie?”

Squeezing Steve’s hand, at a complete loss of what else to do, he reaches out his other hand to rub Steve’s back. “You said it yourself, he loved her.”

There’s a small, hitching sound, suspiciously like a sob, Steve’s whole body moving as he breathes. “But why would he lie to me?”

“Maybe so you wouldn’t blame Natasha? Maybe to protect you both?” He’s out of his depth, in way over his head, and floundering, Tony can’t deny that. He’s never been the best with emotions or comfort.

It’s a relief, coupled with a pang of guilt, when Steve straightens up again, rubbing his face, taking a few breaths before standing up and tugging his hand free from Tony’s grip. He paces the length of the room, then turns, arms folded across his chest, mouth set in a grim line and a frown creasing his forehead. His eyes are slightly red. “Okay, what’s the plan now? You wanted to go underwater, you went, you found some random pieces of junk. So, now what?”

Tony picks up the fourth key, holding it up to show it off. “Now, we go see what is behind door number three.”

Steve frowns. “Is that the best idea?”

Shrugging, Tony stands up, fishing the journal out of his jacket and finding the other three keys. Holding the four of them together, they don’t look like much, but Tony has a feeling that whatever is behind that door is integral to them finding a way out of the town. There’s secrets, Natasha has them, Schmidt must as well, and Tony just knows he has to uncover those secrets in order for this town to let him go. It doesn’t make sense, but then, magic is never logical, which is one of the reasons Tony despises it so much. “Do you have a better idea? I don’t know about you, but I’ve just about had enough of this place, and I’m all for getting out of here as soon as possible. Surely you’re sick of this place as well.”

Rubbing the back of his neck, Steve’s ears go a little red as he looks away, mumbling. “It’s been more bearable since you got here.”

Carefully, Tony picks up the bottle and slides it into the pocket f Steve’s jacket, along with the medal. The dog tags he puts in the other pocket, fingers brushing paper as he does, reminding him of the note that Steve’s had written him the first morning there. Stepping across the room, Tony claps Steve’s on the shoulder as he heads for the door, giving him his best confident grin. “So, we going to do this?”

Steve sucks in a breath, shoulders lifting with it, then falling again as he lets out a sigh. Nodding, he returns Tony’s smile with something fleeting and a little grim.

Squeezing Steve’s shoulder once, then dropping him hand to hold Steve’s, Tony leads the way out the door and down the stairs, keys held tight in his hand. “Just think how much better everything will be when we get out of here alive.”

There’s a slight falter in Steve’s footsteps, he drags back on Tony’s hand, but when Tony glances over his shoulder, Steve is staring resolutely at the ground, watching where he places his feet as they cross the lobby. Shrugging it off, Tony heads for the door behind the front desk, giving his eyes a moment to adjust to the gloom of the staircase, listening to the rumble of the generator further below. Blinking away the lingering light patches from his eyes, Tony starts down the stairs, stopping on the landing by the locked door. Letting go of Steve’s hand, he takes the first key he found and fits it to the lock he’d already determined it belonged to. He could feel Steve hovering right behind him as he fit the others keys to locks, taking several attempts to get them in the right place, but finally all four locks were undone and he can open the door.

As he reaches for the door handle, Steve grips his shoulder, moving in close behind him. “Just, be careful, Tony. We have no idea what could be in there.”

He wants to joke and ask just how bad it could be, but given the dead body in the pump station, Nazi paraphernalia and a murderous wife and the magic trapping them all there, Tony doesn’t want to jinx the situation into being far worse than it has to be. Carefully, he pushes the door open, the hinges squealing in protest, emitting a shower of tiny rust flakes. The door finally pushes all the way open to reveal a small room, that looks like it was part office, art storage room. There’s a small window at the top of the far wall, letting in light, which shows off a desk against the wall below it. Under the desk, there’s an old metal safe, turned a reddish brown with rust. The room looks like it has been ransacked, the desk drawers pulled out and dumped on the desk, the chair balancing on three legs while the other lies broken half way across the room. On the wall adjacent to the desk hangs a painting, askew, the frame stating to rot and the canvas buckled with water damage. It shows a serene landscape that Tony knows he’s seen before, distorted and grey instead of the colours dulled by time that he sees now. Beneath the painting, piled against the wall are rotting cloth bags spilling out dulled and tarnished gold, interspersed with cut gems. There’s a rolled cloth, worn and fraying, eaten away by silverfish and mice, that Tony thinks might have once been a tapestry of some description. Leaning against the wall are other frames, stacked together so their paintings aren’t visible, in varying stages of moldering and decay.

For a brief moment, Tony thinks that his friend, Pepper, would be in tears at the sight of art in such disrepair, but the thought is derailed when his eyes wander to the centre of the room and notice the figure lying prone on the floor, bones and tattered scraps of clothing all that is left of whoever is was. The body has been dead longer than the remains in the pump station, or has decayed at a much more rapid rate, Tony muses, staring at empty eye sockets that stare back. “Who do you think that is?”

Steve’s hand clenches around the back of his jacket, holding him in the doorway as they survey the room. “I don’t know, Tony. But I know what that is.”

Following the line of Steve’s finger as he points, Tony sees the gun, the same some from his vision, lying on the ground amongst the bags and gold. It’s squarer in design, something distinctly German about it, though he can’t place the name of it. It’s old though, something circa World War Two, which fits with the medal he found.

“You just couldn’t keep your nose out of our secrets, could you?”

Tony jumps, jerking back and colliding with Steve’s chest at the sound of the voice. In the shadows of the corner of the room a figure forms, one he’s sure hadn’t been there moments before. Schmidt steps out of the shadows, face sallow and sunken, flesh distorted and red, stretched tight across his skull, patches rotting away. White eyes stare at them, opaque, making Tony for a derailing moment think of the many zombies he’s seen in movies, before he’s jarred back to reality by the way that water seems to be pooling on the floor where Schmidt stands.

“I tried to be a nice host, let you stay here free of charge, but no, you had to cross the line.” Schmidt continues, taking another step closer, leaving a wet footprint in his wake.

Tony feels the nervous laughter bubble out of his throat, even as Steve is tugging him back, trying to pull him out of the room. “If you think being obnoxious and creepy is going to win you customer service awards, you’ve got another thing coming, buddy.”

Rage flickers across Schmidt’s face. “You are incredibly ungrateful for someone who has needed so much help. Such has your desperation been to get out of this place.”

Glancing at the skeleton again, the water damage to the room and contents, everything else that’s in the room, the paranoid ramblings in the stranger’s journal that might not have been so paranoid, Tony’s mind works quickly to put it all together. “And you’re incredibly up yourself for a dead Nazi.”

Water drips from Schmidt’s hands as they clench inot fists, the sound of it hitting the flood almost deafening in the silence that follows. Steve’s gone rigid behind him, fingers so tight on his arms that it’s painful, though he’s frozen in his efforts to drag Tony out of the room.

Schmidt grins, sickening and vicious, showing off yellowing teeth and receding gums. His skins ripples and moves, paling and bloating, looking waterlogged as the pool of water beneath his feet creeps wider. “You think I’m dead? That is most amusing, since it was you that was in the motor vehicle accident.”

Trying to keep his features blank, because the last thing Tony wants to do is let Schmidt know that the thought of being dead himself had crossed his mind. Or in a coma at the very least. Steve’s solid presence behind him, his tight grip on his arms, is reassuring, empowering in a way. “It isn’t my bones on the floor.”

Not even glancing at the skeleton, Schmidt takes another step forward, eyes seeming to fix on Steve, where his hands are on Tony’s arms. “You really are the most troublesome boy. Such a perfect specimen, and yet, so despicable. There’s no point in denying it, I saw the way your were, they way all of that filth was. I made it my mission to rid the world of filth like you and your little friend here. Now I’ll just have to continue my work and kill you, just like I did with the previous owner, the undesirable that he was. Just like I did with that thief who came snooping around here trying to steal what is rightfully mine.”

“You killed the man in the town.” Steve says, voice full of accusation and conviction. “And the old owner, Erskine. You killed him too, why?”

“He turned his back on his country during the war.” Schmidt replies matter of factly, sneering. “The traitor recognised me and had the audacity to think he could report me to the authorities, when it was he who was the traitor.”

“He was a good man.” Steve counters, as he talks he starts to tug at Tony’s arms again, shifting him back carefully and moving himself in front of him.

Belatedly, Tony realises what Steve’s doing. That he’s been manoeuvred out of the way and that Steve is acting as a human shield. He tries to push his way back through, until he’s level with Steve, but finds himself blocked by one out stretched arm.

Schmidt barks out a wicked laugh, the puddle beneath his feet spreading wider. “He was a meddling fool, just like you’re little friend there, boy.”

There’s a flurry over movement all of a sudden and Schmidt lunges forward, fist raised. Steve darts forward to meet him, and Tony trips into the room, caught off balance. He hits the floor, hands skidding around the wet stone, but he catches himself just before his face hits. His vision greys around the edges, swimming before his eyes and then he’s seeing the room in a different time, put together, without water damage and bones on the floor. He sees the same landscape painting on the wall, colours washed out just brush strokes undamaged. The gold sparkles even without colour, the tapestry tightly weaved and not rotting. There are two people in the room, one with his hands around the other’s neck, strangling him where he sits in the chair at the desk. He sees a piece of paper fall from the dying man’s hand, the words _Property Deed_ printed clearly across the top. The man in the chair twitches and jerks, as his nerves refuse to admit death, as the other man straightens up and turns towards Tony. Schmidt sneers down at him, eyes cold.

He chokes on the breath he tries to take in, blinking his eyes and colour returns to his vision, finding his face unnervingly close to Schmidt’s skull on the floor. He pushes himself up onto his hands and knees, barely scurrying out of the way as Steve and Schmidt stagger across the room, Steve blocking every blow that Schmidt tries to land.

”If he dies, he’ll be stuck here forever.” Schmidt snarls, face twisting and warping, trying to claw at Steve’s face.

The room drops in temperature, Steve’s breath fogging in front of him as he reels back, head jerking back as he takes a few quick steps across the room. He hits the desk, kicks a bone across the room, and reaches behind him, hands grasping for anything he can find. His hand closes over the back of a chair, in one quick move he swings the chair up and throws it at Schmidt, who flickers like static and warps, the chair passing right through him and hitting the wall. “Don’t you even dare.”

Tony scrambles across the room, trying to retrieve the bone that Steve kicked, scooping it up and throwing it back into the pile. He’s starting to panic, can feel it rising up in his throat, how do they fight something that is incorporeal. A ghost. A murderous Nazi ghost at that.

“He’ll be here with you forever, boy. Just think about it.” Schmidt lunges again, hand making contact with Steve, who grimaces, teeth clenched, his face going pale.

Reaching behind him, Steve grabs the next thing his hand touches, one of the upended desk drawers, swinging it around, clasping it in both hands and slamming it into Schmidt’s face. He man howls, reels back, face twisted and red, eyes black.

“Over my dead body.” Steve spits, slamming the drawer into Schmidt’s face again, and again, until he pulls his hand free from Steve’s chest and the drawer passes straight through him, clattering to the floor when Steve lets go of it in surprise.

Schmidt grins, wicked and cruel. “Oh, boy, that is all too easy.”

Moving back into the centre of the room, Steve places himself firmly between Schmidt and Tony, shoulders rigid and fist balled, raised despite the repeated proof that fighting a ghost is impossible. “Any time soon, would be good Tony.” He mutters, not even glancing over his shoulder. Adopting a fighters stance, he tilts his head at Schmidt again. “Not as easy as you think.”

Think, Stark, think. Tony glances all around the room, trying to find some sort of a clue, but not coming up with anything. He glances down at the pile of bones and rags that had once been Johann Schmidt. Bones. Remains. It clicks then, scrambling to his feet, flings himself towards the door. “Keep him busy!”

“I can do this all day.” Steve’s cocky reply follows him out the room, as he skids into the stairwell and nearly tumbling down the staircase. Taking the stairs three at a time, Tony heads for the basement, feeling warmer the further he gets away from the room, he trips into the generator room, slams into the wall when he’s unable to stop. Grabbing one of the fuel cans there, he pushes off the wall and runs back to the stairs. He jumping back up the stairs as quickly as he can, dropping the fuel on the landing outside the door to Schmidt’s room, he keeps running up the stairs. Bursting out into the lobby he nearly collides with the front desk, stopping himself just short of hitting i, turning sharply and heading for the stairs to the second floor. Running down the hall past Steve’s room, he hits the wall trying to turn the corner, bouncing off of it and grabbing at the next door way that he comes to, using the momentum to spin around into the kitchen. Lungs burning, Tony gives the room a quick once over, then heads for the cupboard at the back, flinging the doors open, searching the shelves inside. Knocking aside condiment and the odd jar, Tony grabs the bag of salt from the back of the cupboard.

“C’mon Sam and Dean, don’t let me down now.” He mutters under his breath, tucking the bag of salt against his chest and turning, towards the stove. There’s a box of matches near the cook top, which he grabs and shoves in his pocket, then heads for the door, heart hammering, in part from the running, part due to fear. “Hang on Steve.”

He can barely breathe past the fear when he gets back to the room, the cold sucking what little breath he had left out of his lungs. Somehow, Steve is still standing, looking worse for wear, hair a mess, skin pale and sweat slicked, his shirt ripped across the chest and an angry red mark on his cheek. Panting for breathe, Steve holds a short piece of wood in his hand, spinning around the to room. Schmidt is no where to be seen, but the room still feels impossible cold.

“What happened?” Tony skids to a stop, dropping the fuel can that he picked up on the way in.

“He keeps disappearing.” Steve spins again, eyes searching high and low, when he glances at Tony again he gives him give him a lopsided grin. “Knows a fight he can’t win.”

The air behind him ripples and rolls like water, fronds of reeds started to appear of the walls again. “Behind you!” Tony shouts, ripping open the bag of salt and dumping the whole thing over the bones on the floor. The room gets colder, he can hear Steve breathing, the little grunts of exertion he makes as he fights, but Tony makes himself focus on the job at hand. He grabs the fuel can, unscrewing the cap, pouring the contents over the salt and bones, the fumes making him light-headed.

“Steve! Steve we need to go now!” Tony looks up, fumbling the matches out of his pocket and shaking them out of the box. He drops half of them, hands trembling so bad and his head spinning from the petrol. Steve is swinging wildly, knocking aside underwater deluge that pours out of the wall, reeds and mud already starting to pool on the floor.

Schmidt laughs, manic and evil. “I told you once before, you can’t leave.”

“And I told you, this isn’t Hotel California.” Tony finally strikes a match, it splutters and bursts as the other matches he holds with it ignite as well, he drops the matches, watching as they fall. “Steve, now!”

Steve throws his piece of wood, pivots and barrels into Tony, arms around his chest as he all but picks his up and carries him out of the room. There’s a whooshing sound, and a burst of heat that Tony feels against his face, and somewhere in the room, Schmidt’s scream of rage is cut off by the roar of fire. They hit the wall, Tony’s shoulder and back colliding with stone, but something stops his head from hitting. He’s dropped, barely manages to stay on his feet, then Steve grabs his wrist and starts dragging him up the stairs.

“Jesus! Tony, are you insane?” Steve yells over his shoulder as the spill into the lobby. He doesn’t stop though, just keeps running, keeps dragging Tony along behind him until he throws the front door open and they burst out into the daylight.

Tony trips, staggers across the grass and weeds, and eventually falls. His knees hit the ground, something digging into his calf, and it feels like his shoulder is about to be wrenched from its socket when Steve keeps running, but he stops suddenly. Past the point of balance, Tony tips forward and sprawls out on the grass, he tugs hard enough that he must overbalance Steve as well, because when he lifts his face out of the dewy grass, he finds Steve sprawled out on the ground beside him. Rolling over, he props himself up on his elbows to survey the scene behind them.

Smoke billows out of the front door, thick and grey, however the building itself in dark and Tony can’t make out the glow of fire. “Oops.”

There’s a snort of disbelief from behind him. “Oops? Seriously, Tony. What were you thinking?”

Tony shrugs, wincing when it pulls at his still smarting shoulder not taking his eyes off the building, but even as he watches the smoke looks like it’s thinning out. “That to get rid of an evil ghost, you need to salt and burn the remains.”

There’s a beat or two, when he hears Steve take two measured careful breathes. “How do you even know something like that?”

Tony turns his head to look at Steve, feeling the movement pull at his back, but he hides it under a bright grin. “It’s Winchester 101 for ghost eradication.”

Steve’s mouth forms a silent word as he frowns in confusion, looking completely lost. Shaking his head, his face moves back into a mixture of concern and disapproval. “It was dangerous.”

“No more dangerous than fighting an evil Nazi ghost bent on trying to kill us.” Tony spits back, feeling defensive. He slumps back down to the ground, shoulders and back hurting too much to try and keep himself propped up any longer. ”Worked didn’t it?”

Silence draws out for a while, long enough that Tony starts to worry he really stuffed up, then he feels Steve’s hand close around his wrist again, thumb stroking gently over his pulse. He tilts his head back enough to find Steve looking at him, something in his expression he can’t quite read.

Offering him a small, almost shy smile, Steve squeezes his wrist gently. “Thanks, Tony. You did good.”

He isn’t sure if it’s the way that Steve is looking at him, or his words, but everything in Tony chest seems to jitter and wobble, and he has to look away before he does something like roll over and kiss Steve. “Yeah, well, I’m partial to not being killed by ghost Nazis, and I kind of like you, you know, alive.”

He too busy trying to stand up again that he doesn’t realise that the silence has dragged on for a long time, until he glances around as Steve stands up too, folding his arms across his chest, shoulders hunching inwards. Steve’s face is pale, jaw clenched and eyes downcast; he think his eyes look damp, but he looks away too quickly for Tony to get a better look.

“Steve?” Tony takes a tentative step forward, but Steve just hunches further in one himself. “Are you okay? Did he hurt you?”

Shaking his head, Steve sucks in a breath that makes his whole body move, then drops his arms, and straightens his shoulders. When he looks back at Tony, he’s still pale, but his eyes are clear. He rubs a hand over his chest, the same place Tony had seen Schmidt’s hand pass straight through his shirt and skin, to the wrist, like he’d been reaching into Steve’s chest cavity. Like he’d been trying to stop Steve’s heart. Bile rises into the back of Tony’s throat at the thought, his stomach turning, nausea making his head spin.

In two steps, Steve is at his side, gripping his shoulder, one arm going around his waist, holding him up. “Hey, you okay?”

Turning to press his face into Steve’s shoulder, Tony brings a hand up to touch Steve’s chest. There’s a slightly muddy mark and a tear in his shirt, where Schmidt’s hand had gone through. Shuddering at the memory, Tony presses his hand flat against Steve’s chest, needing to remind himself that it is solid and whole. There’s the hard bite of metal beneath Steve’s still damp shirt, the outline of Steve’s dog tags evident beneath the soft fabric. Pulling in a breath, full of the scent of warm leather, aftershave and the damp, putrid scent of the water in the sewer, Tony tries to swallow the lump in his throat, but it refuses to move enough for him to fit words passed. He leans his forehead against Steve’s clavicle, he eyes the tear in Steve’s shirt, poking his finger at it to pull it apart a little further, checking the skin beneath. Steve’s skin is pale and prickled with goose bumps, but otherwise unblemished, much to Tony’s relief. He can just see the edge of the dog tags against Steve’s chest, make out the stamped letters _Steven G._ before Steve shifts, hand touching Tony’s chin and tilting his head back.

Making eye contact, Steve eyes his worriedly. “Are you okay?”

Nodding, Tony pokes at the skin on Steve’s chest with one finger. “I thought he was going to kill you. Fuck, Steve, I thought that was it.”

Steve gives him a slightly sardonic smile, looking away, back towards the hotel. “He didn’t.”

“Good.” Tony mumbles, closing his eyes and pressing his face into the crook of Steve’s neck. There’s been too much going on, too many things happening that Tony can’t make sense of. Things like ghosts aren’t meant to be real. “I was actually joking about this being the Twilight Zone.”

Steve’s fingers ghost across the back of his neck. “I still don’t know what you’re talking about, but I’m going to guess it has something to do with there being a ghost in the hotel.”

“Ghosts, aliens, magic, anything like that. It doesn’t make sense.” Tony mutters against Steve’s skin, curling his hand closed around the hard lines of the tags beneath Steve’s shirt. “I hate things that don’t make sense. I like logic and fact and things that actual, real science can prove.”

Steve’s fingers close around the back of his neck carefully, squeezing lightly. His head tilts down, just enough that Tony can feel his jaw resting against the top of his head. “I’m sorry. That you got stuck here. That it doesn’t make sense.”

“That’s hardly your fault.” Tony tries to reassure him, forcing himself to pull away from Steve, despite wanting nothing more than to just stay leaning against him and take a few moments to try and make sense of all the weird that that is going on around them. He can’t justify wasting the time though. Taking a step back he gives Steve and critical once over, noticing that the red marks on his cheeks have faded down to almost nothing. “I’m just going to be so glad when we get out of here.”

Nodding a little stiffly, Steve squeezes the back of Tony’s neck once more before dropping his hand away. “What else do you think we have to do before this place will let you leave?”

Patting his pocket, Tony feels the hard edge of the glass bottle. “I think we need to go talk to Natasha.”

Steve’s face falls, jaw setting and lips pressing into a grim line. Folding his arms over his chest he glances at the hotel and then turns to look out across the water towards the cemetery, the lights just visible through the fog. “What good do you think it is going to do?”

There’s an edge to his voice that Tony hasn’t heard before, something defensive and angry. He had suspected that it would be hard to get Steve to agree to confronting Natasha. He’s not even sure what good it is going to do to get her to admit that she killed her husband. He’s not sure what that even has to do with any of this, and the recent revelation that Schmidt was dead, probably died in the flood, well, Tony isn’t quite sure he can fit all the pieces together unless Natasha is also, somehow, dead. If this is some kind of purgatory that Schmidt and Natasha are stuck in, then maybe he has to move them on before he can leave.

He studies the tight line of Steve’s shoulders, pulling at his damp shirt, they way they rise and fall as he breathes a little harsher than usual, his whole body language agitated. He wants to reach out, to touch him, but he gets as far as lifting his hand; it hovers there, inches away from Steve. He can’t bring himself to touch Steve though, just stares at the back of his hand as a thought niggles at the back of his mind, a theory that the resolutely does not want to study, an idea that he doesn’t want to entertain. He pushes it back, locking it away with all the other bad things he would rather forget and not dwell on.

He takes several branching breathes, trying to pick his words carefully. “Maybe none. But, maybe, it’ll give both of you enough closure that we can all leave.”

Steve’s shoulders hunch forward a little as he turns just enough to glance back at Tony, a sad, wistful sort of smile. “You really think we’ll all get to leave?”

He hopes so. He really does. As much as he wants to leave this place, as desperate as he is to get out of there and get to Rhodey’s where it’s safe, he can’t imagine leaving without Steve. He’s lost track of how many days he’s been here, but it’s few enough that he knows he shouldn’t be so attached to Steve. He doesn’t even know his last name, what he likes to do in his spare time, how he drinks his coffee. He barely knows anything about him, but he knows that he wants to. He wants to get to know Steve better, and hang out, and take him on dates. If Steve will let him.

He tries to give Steve the most reassuring smile he can muster, but he knows it falls short of the mark by a long shot. “I really hope so.”

Steve’s smile twitches and then slips away entirely, his eyes staying sad even as his jaw sets with determination. “I guess we should go talk to Natasha then. I promised Buck I’d look after her, you know. I’m not goin’ ta leave her here alone.”

They head back into the hotel and take the stairs down to the basement. Tony pulls his shirt up to cover his nose and mouth against the smoke that lingers in the air, thick and oily smelling from the fuel accelerant, that fades by the time they make it down to the basement. Reluctantly, Tony gets in the elevator with Steve, taking his hand once the gate is closed, trying to ignore the way cage rattles and shakes as it descends.

The boat trip across the water is silent, except for the gentle chug of the engine. Tony resists the urge to slow down as they pass the church tower, putting his hand in his pocket to close his fingers around the dog tags that he’d found outside the church beneath the water. He knows there’s still something important about the church, some way that it’s all connected. He knows he’ll have to look inside the tower at some point, even though it’ll mean keeping Steve out on the water longer than is fair. As it is, Steve looks pale and shaky until they make land at the cemetery; his hand cold in Tony’s as they take the path to Bucky’s grave, picking their way through the other headstones until they start the shallow decline to the back of the cemetery.

Natasha is there, sitting at Bucky’s grave, red hair bright against all the dull, misty colours, her skirts flared out on the ground around her. She doesn’t look up as they approach, gives no indication that she even notices them; sitting there, head bowed, hands folded serenely in her lap, holding a photograph between her fingers.

Tony presses his hand against the Strychnine bottle in the pocket of Steve’s jacket, trying to figure out how he can possibly work that into conversation. How to just casually accuse someone of murder. After what happened with Schmidt, Tony isn’t sure he wants to endure the same sort of fight with Natasha, on the off chance that she’s a ghost too. He didn’t bring any salt. He fishes the bottle out of his pocket and holds it up to study it again, wondering, briefly, if Strychnine would have any effect on ghosts at all.

Beyond his focus, he thinks he sees Natasha stiffen and shift, her dress becoming heavy with water.

“Are you here for vengeance, dear boy?” Natasha doesn’t look up as she speaks, still staring down at the photograph in her hands, as the gravel beeath her starts to darken.

Tony flinches at the words, nearly drops the bottle. He isn’t sure what sort of vengeance he is meant to be seeking, but before he can puzzle it over too much, Steve plucks the bottle out of his hand and takes a step forward, his grip tightening on Tony’s hand as he does.

“Vengeance for what?” Steve asks carefully, though his jaw is set, face grim, as though he already knows the answer to his own question.

Water starts to drip down from Natasha’s fair, pulling it out of its neat bun to hang in tendrils around her face. The photo in her hand starts to buckle with water damage, twisting it enough that Tony can just make out the image of a young man who looks so familiar, but he isn’t sure where he’s seen him before. Suddenly Natasha lifts her head, turning her face towards them, her carefully applied make up smudged and running, black tear streaks down from opaque white eyes.

Steve’s hand tightens around his, to the point of pain, but neither of them flinch when Natasha sets Steve with a cold, dead stare. “I killed James, dear boy.”

Pain, distress, anger and sadness all flash across Steve’s face before he sets his jaw resolutely, hand clenching around the bottle, his other starting to tremble in Tony’s grasp. His breathing goes a little shallow, strained, but when he speaks he sounds calm. “You didn’t kill him, Natasha. Rumlow and his men did.”

Her make up bleeds further, but it’s impossible to tell what is water and what is tears. “If he’d never turned himself in, never confessed to Alexander’s murder, then he never would have been in gaol.”

Steve’s hand starts to shake more violently, until he squeezes his fingers around Tony’s so tightly the shaking stops. Trying not to wince, Tony feels like a spectator, caught on the sidelines of a conversation he only knows a few of the facts behind. He’d been expecting another showdown like they’d had with Schmidt, or at least to have to convince Natasha of what had happened. He really hadn’t expected her to just admit what happened.

“He loved you, Natasha. Bucky, he was a jerk, but he loved you, and he would have done anything in the world to see you safe and happy.” Steve says quietly, his voice getting a little strained around the name. He glances at Tony, giving him a pleading look that Tony can’t quite work out before he extracts his hand from Tony’s and takes a step forward to crouch down to Natasha’s level.

 _Stay, please don’t leave_. Tony realises what the plea had been, taking a small step forward and reaching out, setting his hand on Steve’s shoulder, watching as the muscles there relax slightly as he does. Steve sets the bottle of Strychnine down on the ground, between him and Natasha.

Natasha eyes the bottle for a moment, breath hitching a little as she reaches to pick it up, running her thumb over the embossed writing. “He didn’t deserve to die like that.”

Steve grits his teeth, breathing in and out harshly. “Yes he did. He never should have treated you the way he did.”

It takes Tony a confused second to realise that they must be talking about Natasha’s husband now, instead of Bucky. The Mayor who Schmidt accused of being rotten, the marriage he’d said was equally as rotten. He knows that he really can’t trust the word of a murderous Nazi ghost, but it seems as though he might have been right about some things.

Natasha dabs at her eyes with the corner of a sodden handkerchief, face grim. “Maybe, but I never meant for James to take the blame for it. He’d asked me to run away with him, before any of it even happened, but I mistook him for a naive boy. I should have just gone.”

Steve’s lips twitch in a brittle smile. “Buck always had big ideas. Most of them weren’t all that well thought out, but his heart was in the right place. He really did love you, Natasha. I don’t think he minded dying to save you.”

Reaching out, Natasha places one hand over the back of Steve’s, a soft look flitting over her face, at odds with the opaqueness of her eyes. “He loved you too, dear boy.”

Steve jaw clenches and he looks away. Tony has just enough time to make out the pain that flashes across Steve’s face before he can’t see it any more. He squeezes Steve’s shoulder, at a loss of what else to do. Natasha glances up at Tony for a second, something akin to contentment crossing her face before it slips back into melancholy.

“Maybe not as much as some love you, Steven, but he did love you. In his own way.”

Nodding stiffly, Steve leans back into Tony’s touch, back pressing against his leg like he needs something to stop him from toppling to the ground. “I know. I miss him, Natasha. Not a day goes by where I don’t miss him.”

Drawing her hand back away from Steve’s, Natasha looks back towards the grave, face carefully blank. “Do you blame me?”

“For him dying? No ma’am.” Steve shakes his head, looking like he’s going to reach out to Natasha again but stops the movement abruptly, looking unsure. “Buck always had crazy ideas. He made a choice, and as much as I don’t like the results, I gotta respect the decision he made. He died doing what he thought was right. He died so you’d have a chance.”

“And I wasted that chance. Sitting here in my grief, trying to come to terms with what I’d done. Ignoring everything as the flood water came crashing in.” Natasha carefully dabs at her eyes again, pushing damp hair back from her face. “I’m sorry you d-”

Steve leans forward and presses a finger to Natasha’s lips, giving her a sad smile, moving his hand to cup her cheek. “Hey now, don’t you worry about any of that, Natasha. What happened happened. There ain’t nothing that any of us can do about it now. I made a promise to Buck that I’d look out for you, and I intend to keep that promise. Just want to see you at peace.”

Natasha closes her eyes, leaning into Steve’s touch, bringing a hand up to press against the back of his. “Do you think he’s waiting for me?”

“He’ll be saving you the best seat.” Steve’s voice hitches a little, eyes squeezed shut, eyelashes damp.

Feeling his own eyes sting and the back of his throat grow tight, Tony feels like he’s standing on the edge of an important discovery but not having all the data yet to make it. He can feel the grief in the air, both Natasha’s and Steve’s, yet there is nothing he can do to try and soothe it. Nothing he can do to make any of it better. Even if he knew exactly what happened, he doesn’t think he could make a difference. As he stands there, feeling useless, gripping Steve’s shoulder with every thing he’s got, he watches a gentle smile settle onto Natasha’s face.

“We’ll wait for you too. When your time comes.” She whispers, tilting her head to press a kiss to the heel of Steve’s hand and disappearing.

Steve rocks forward, hand outstretched into empty air, where Natasha had been seconds before. Dragging him back, trying to stop him pitching forward onto the gravel, Tony blinks at the empty space where Natasha had been, the only trace of her presence left is the bottle, lying in the damp gravel, and a water damaged photo. Steve pulls his hand back, curling it into a fist, tucking it against his chest as he leans heavily against Tony’s leg. Neither of them say anything, Tony has no idea what he could possibly say, settling instead for stroking his fingers through Steve’s hair.

After a long moment, Steve leans away from Tony and pushes himself to his feet, wiping his hand across his eyes as he does. When he turns to look at Tony, there are two spots of colour high on his cheeks and redness around his eyes, at odds with the paleness of the rest of his skin. He swallows, throat bobbing, and for a moment it looks like he wants to say something, face determined, before his expression cracks, grief slipping through. Not knowing what else to do, Tony reaches out, pulling Steve into a hug, letting Steve cling to him, ragged breathing and trembling shoulders hunched over as he presses his face against Tony’s neck.

They stay there for what seems like a long time, Tony rubbing Steve’s shoulders and trying to hold him up, staring out across the cemetery and watching as the light get a little brighter and the shadows more defined. He isn’t sure, but he thinks the mist has receded a little bit, thinning out and letting the colours creep back in, rather than everything being washed out in grey. He hears Steve’s breathing start to settle, feels his body fall still, before with a bit of a jerk, he pulls away, taking a step back and turning away from Tony as he wipes at his face.

“Sorry. About that.” Steve grates the words out, a sharp edge to them, scrubbing a hand over his face and through his hair, taking a few deep, stilted breaths.

Tucking his hands in his pockets, Tony closes one hand around the dog tags, shrugging, even though it goes unseen. “Don’t mention it. You okay?”

Nodding stiffly, Steve folds his arms across his chest, closing off in such a way that Tony thinks if he hadn’t been the one to reach out, then Steve would have bottled it all up and not shown any signs of grief. It doesn’t feel at all healthy, given everything that’s happened, but Tony is hardly in a position to judge anyone on how they choose to grieve.

Silence stretches out for a while, Tony waits, watching the lines of sunlight peaking through the clouds cut tracks through the mist. The place feels warmer, less ominous, something Tony hadn’t really thought too much about the while time he’d been there, but the cemetery is less creepy and more serene in the actual light of day.

Straightening his shoulders and dropping his arms away from his chest, Steve sucks in a deep breath, jaw set. “You can leave now.”

Despite the word choice and the body language, it isn’t dismissive, Tony isn’t really sure what it is, half hopeful, half resigned, something else entirely that he can’t quite put his finger on. The thought of leaving sits oddly in his mind, making his chest feel tight with anxiety. He’d been so focused on the impossible task of escaping the town he hadn’t thought about what it would be like to actually achieve it. He thinks about Rhodey and how worried his friend has to be, the lecture he’s going to get when he gets to him, the idea makes him want to laugh in relief and cringe at the same time. He thinks about leaving, with Steve, about what they’re going to do when they get out of there, so caught up in the idea of taking Steve home and looking after him for a change that it takes him a while to process the actual words that Steve said.

“We.” He amends with conviction. “We can leave now.”

Steve’s jaw clenches, a frown forming, but he doesn’t look back at Tony. “There’s a few things I have to do first, before I leave. You should try making your way to the road though, see if you can thumb a lift.”

He can hear the words that Steve is saying, but none of them really make sense. He can’t imagine leaving without Steve, just walking away while Steve stays in town. They’ve stuck together this whole time he isn’t going to lose him right at the end. If he leaves, and Steve stays behind for a little while longer, then how will they ever find each other again? The idea is just absurd. Stepping around in front of Steve, Tony curls his fingers around Steve’s wrist, holding on tight, watching as the frown lessens and disappears, replaced by a small, tired smile.

“I’m not leaving you here.” Tony feels sick just thinking it. “That’s just crazy talk. How about we just get back to the hotel, I’ll make some coffee, you do what you have to do, and then we’ll head off together?”

Steve stares at him with impossibly sad eyes, that Tony can’t help but reach up to cup the side of his face. Steve’s eyes close as he leans into the touch, jaw clenching and throat bobbing. “Okay, Tony. We can do that.”

Squeezing Steve’s wrist, Tony tugs him in the direction of the boat, gravel crunching beneath their feet as they start back up the slope. There are questions that he wants to ask, about what Steve plans to do once they leave, but he’s not sure he wants to hear the answers. Part of his rationalises that if he puts off asking, he can keep Steve with him for a while longer, take him to Rhodey’s with him, spend time with him, before Steve inevitably decides to track down the family that is undoubtedly worried about him. He doesn’t want to ask, so he doesn’t. It isn’t the way to deal with things, Tony is well aware of that, but no one ever accused him of making rational decisions based on emotions.

Once they’re out on the water, the outboard motor chugging away and drowning out some of Tony’s thoughts, he starts to feel a sense of uneasiness again, like he’d felt the whole time he’s been here, that had lessened back in the cemetery once Natasha had disappeared. Subconsciously he finds himself steering the boat closer to the church tower. There’s still something about it, a sense of unfinished business that he can’t quite shake; he can almost hear the clang of the church bell in his head, calling to him, reminding him that there is something that needs to be done. Something he hasn’t faced yet. Something he’s overlooked.

The closer they get to the church, the more restless Steve gets, glancing around, face pale, staring wide eyed at the church tower before resolutely looking everywhere but at it. “Tony, come on, we should get off the water.”

Manoeuvring the boat as close as he can get it, Tony reaches a hand out and grabs the side of the church, cutting the motor and guiding the boat to a stop. He can feel Steve fidgeting through the boat rocking and bobbing. He glances over at him, offering what he hopes is a reassuring smile, but he can already feel a level of apprehension himself. “I just want to take a quick look. There’s something about this place, it kept popping up in the visions, so that means it’s going to be important, right?”

Steve stares out across the water, towards the silhouette of the hotel high up on the cliff, now visible through the mist. He shifts in his seat, hands gripping the sides of the boat so he can look back over his shoulder, looking away from the church and Tony. “I think we should just get going. If we waste too much time, it’ll be dark by the time you get to the road. You don’t want to be thumbing a lift after dark.”

Still hanging onto the side of the church, Tony carefully stands up, moving to the middle of the boat so he’s level will the shuttered window. Holding onto the window ledge, he leans as far over as he can, reaching out one hand to run his fingertips over Steve’s cheek. Steve turns his head enough to look at him, the sadness from before etched in his whole face, shadows of it under his eyes, in the downwards turn of his lips. He takes a chance and strokes his thumb across Steve’s bottom lip, playfully trying to tug it up in the corner and earning a glare and two bright spots of pink on Steve’s cheeks for his efforts, which he counts as an improvement from the sadness. “Just a quick look. It might mean the difference between me getting to leave and passing out in the forest again.”

He can’t shake the visions, the figure running into the church, the dog tags in the water, the church bell. He can’t just ignore those, not if there is still another poor soul that needs to be put to rest. He wants to say as much to Steve, but is derailed from the thought when Steve suddenly pitches forward, pressing his face against Tony’s thigh, one hand grabbing the back of his knee in a grip that is almost painful. He can feel Steve’s breath hot through the leg of his jeans, a counter point to the two patches of cold where his face and hand sit. Fumbling, trying to keep his balance, Tony rests his hand on top of Steve’s head, combing his fingers through his hair.

“Please don’t.” Steve begs, voice barely audible over the lap of the water against the boat at the church. “Tony, please. Just sit back down and let’s get out of here. We can both leave, right away, if you want. Together. Just, please, let’s go.”

“I can’t.” The words slip out, just as desperate as Steve’s pleas, because it’s true, he can’t. There’s the church bell, echoing in his mind, the weight of the water crashing down on him. The fear of his dream, when Steve’s hand had slipped out of his and he’d been dragged away by the flood. It’s all there, pounding in his head and he just can’t ignore it, can’t just sit back down and drive the boat away. He can’t just leave. Part of him knows he won’t be able to yet, even if he wants to.

“I can’t.” He reiterates with more conviction, lifting his hand away from Steve’s hair and moving his focus back to the window. Fishing the screwdriver out of the internal pocket of Steve’s jacket, using it to jimmy the rusted latch on the shutters. It takes a bit of force, enough that he has to brace himself and the boat beneath him rocks. Enough that Steve’s hold shifts from desperate clinging to something more like support, which just makes Tony feel terrible, because not only has he ignored Steve’s pleas, but now he’s making him help.

The latch pops open, the shutters drooping under their own weight as they swing out and clatter against the side of the church, sending white flakes of paint and fragments of wood drifting down into the bottom of the boat and across the top of the water. Gripping the window ledge, Tony glances down at Steve, meeting his grim, resigned gaze with as much apology as he can fit into a short look. “I’ll be right back.”

Hauling himself up, trying to use his arms as much as possible, Tony gets a knee up onto the ledge and fits his shoulders through the window. He feels Steve’s hand on the small of his back to support him, steady him as he climbs from the boat to the tower. The boat rocks violently as he pushes off, and he’s glad for the support. Tumbling into the room beyond the window, Tony coughs at the dust he’s dislodged and blinks rapidly as his eyes slowly adjust to the dim light. Dust motes dance through the beams of light from the holes in the roof.

In the dim light he can make out the cradle for the bell’s pivot, the cavity in the floor beside the ladder leading down into the water where the pull rope would have once fallen. The bell is long gone, no doubt the wood having rotten and give way under the weight of the bell, which he imagines now sits in the bottom of the church under the water. He keeps looking around the room, can still hear the bell tolling in his head though he imagines it has been silent for years. Everything in the room, the few bits and pieces that look like they were stored in to standing space of the tower look like they’ve been thrown around, tossed bout by the water. It might have receded now, but if Schmidt’s room is anything to gauge by, Tony thinks the flood waters must have been a lot higher when they first crashed through the town.

All he can think about is the figure in his vision, running towards the church, no doubt in search of high ground. It was never going to be high enough.

The thought clenches in his throat painfully, making it hard to breathe as he turns, slowly, to look behind him. Steve’s still in the boat, standing, holding onto the window frame so he didn’t drift away. He’s not looking at Tony, instead his head is turned, staring back out over the water like he can’t bear to look in the room. His face is impossibly sad. He looks worse than before, skin so pale his lips look blue.

“Steve?” Tony takes a step forward, having every intention to go back to the window and make sure Steve is okay. As he does, however, he catches sight of something in the corner on the room. He jerks back at the sight, heart hammering, it doesn’t matter how fresh the thought is of someone fleeing from the flood to the church, he still isn’t prepared to see the body there, in the corner of the room, like it had been tossed there, without care. Discarded. Another life claimed by the flood, the same flood that Steve was adamant hadn’t taken any lives. Part of him wants to accuse Steve of lying, but he can’t, not when one of those people who died was someone Steve had promised to look after. He had enough guilt without Tony adding to it.

His eyes adjust more the longer he stares at the skeleton, until he can make out the skeletal face staring blankly back at him.

He steps closer. “There’s another body. I thought there would be. I, just. How could they just leave them here? Didn’t anyone come through and search after the flood? Who do you think it...”

He trails off, voice sticking in his throat as his breath freezes in his chest.

Despite the age of the corpse, the lack of defining features, Tony’s gaze is stuck on the cracked brown leather of the jacket crumpled around collapsed ribs and shoulders. Tony swallows the bile in the back of his throat as his fingers clench around the cuffs of the brown leather jacket he’s wearing.

Steve’s brown leather jacket.

“No.” The word chokes out of his throat, strangled and dry and tearing at his vocal cords as it escapes. “No.”

“Tony,” Steve whispers, but he sounds miles away.

“No!” Tony’s voice gains more strength, each word breaking in his mouth and cutting his tongue. “No! Nonononononono!”

“Tony, I’m sorry.”

“Shut up!” His vision blurs, his cheeks wet, his throat and chest feel like they’re on fire and encased in ice at the same time. “No! Shut up! No! No!”

The room feels like it’s tilting, it gets darker, the beams of light disappearing as clouds roll back in. Tony staggers, stumbling back a step, his mind screaming at him to get away from the skeleton, from the tower, from the whole crazy fucking town.

From Steve.

Why did he have to be so stubborn, why did he insist on looking inside the church. He should have just left when Steve suggested it.

 _Steve. Perfect, sturdy, solid, alive Steve._ He finally drags his eyes away from the skeleton – from Steve’s skeleton – to look at him standing in the boat outside the window. Steve gazes back, pale skin, blue lips, tears in his perfectly blue eyes.

“Tony–”

He shakes his head, keeps shaking even though it makes him dizzy. He can’t think, can’t slot the pieces into place. Steve still looks like Steve. There’s no opaque eyes, no water drenched appearance, nothing at all resembling what it had been like with Schmidt and Natasha.

Except Steve’s clinging to the window frame like it’s the only thing holding him up, or holding him down, knuckles going white, and he looks utterly distraught. Like his whole world is ending.

Again.

It all makes sense, stupid, ridiculous, crystal clear sense. Steve’s confusion and lack of knowledge about modern technology, his patchy memory and inability to differentiate time laspes in his recall. His reaction to the water, his aversion of the church tower. The fact that the dog tags he found in the sunken town bore the same name as the tags hanging around Steve’s neck. The photo in his room of the soldier that looked just like him. It hadn’t been some close relation to Steve, it had been Steve. In the army. In World War Two, which was why he’d known so much about German guns and war medals.

He survived a war, only to come home and drown in a church.

Tony feels sick, caught between wanting to throw up and sob uncontrollably. “You knew. You knew you were dead, and you never told me. Unlike the other two deluded ghosts in this place, you knew! And what? Now Natasha’s passed on, you just hoped that this place would let me go? Why were you even in this stupid fucking town, huh? Tell me that, Steve, why where you even here? You knew this place was going to flood. You knew about the evacuation. Why the fuck didn’t you just leave?” He can feel the words grating their way out of his through and over his tongue.

Steve just stands there in the boat, clinging to the window ledge for a long time just staring out across the water. “I promised Buck I’d look after her. Make sure she was okay.”

Natasha. Tony knows he’s talking about Natasha. Beautiful, grieving Natasha who had refused to leave Bucky’s grave and died when the flood had hit. The vision he’d had but hadn’t made sense of, the figure running through town, the water rolling in hot on their heels. The last flight up the stairs to the church tower. It had been Steve. Steve trying to make it to the cemetery to save Natasha. Steve, stupid, brave Steve who had made the foolish decision to try and find high ground in the church bell tower, only for the flood to reach him anyway.

“It’s like Natasha said, you just want to save everyone.” Tony hears himself whisper, voice wavering with grief. “You were trying to save her, and now-” He can’t say it, his throat closes over the words.

Steve looks back around at him, catching his eye and offering him a sad smile. “And now I’m trying to save you. I didn’t need you to show me I’m dead, Tony. I already knew that. I think I always knew it, but just forgot sometimes. Then, when I had to pull you out of the water, that’s when it all came back. After that, I just knew that I wasn’t going to pass on until everyone was safe.”

His stomach rolls and clenches with guilt, remembering Steve coughing up water and curled into the foetal position on the stone floor in the pump station, that horrible moment he’d just put down to hydrophobia had been Steve remembering and reliving his final moments in the church, when he’d realised that he still wasn’t going to be high enough to escape the flood.

Pushing the thoughts aside, the memory of Steve’s shaking body and wet hair against his lips. “And now Natasha’s gone, you can go too, right?”

The words stab at his heart, sting at his throat and eyes and he knows he’s crying. He doesn’t want Steve to go. He doesn’t want Steve to be dead. But as usual, the world is one huge steaming pile of unfair bullshit.

The anguish on Steve’s face shifts, turning more into determination and realisation, and Tony has to look away before it can turn into relief when Steve finally realises he can leave.

“She was talking about you, wasn’t she?” He knows it’s true even as he asks. “In the cemetery, after I had a vision and you went to get me some water, Natasha told me a story. About a young man who loved someone so much, who didn’t love him back the same way, he died trying to keep a promise he’d made them. I thought she was talking about Bucky and herself. But she wasn’t was she?”

He doesn’t wait for a response keeps barrelling on, because he’s sure the second he stops thinking about this, he’ll start begging Steve not to leave him. “You loved Bucky, and you died trying to save Natasha, because you’d promised you’d look out for her. A loyal fool with a heart of gold, who was killed by his need to save those he loved.”

The more he talks the weaker his voice gets, choked out by a thought, an emotion he never wanted to label, but can’t ignore as it tries to consume him whole. The thought of just why Steve stayed with him the whole time, looked out for him. Saved him time and time again; actions speaking words that felt ridiculous to say after such a short amount of time. However, he wants to say them back, to let Steve know it isn’t a one way thing.

“Tony.” Steve whispers just as he’s trying to work up the courage to speak. “I wish I’d met you in another time.”

“Me too.” He chokes out the reply, gearing himself up to turn around. “Steve, I lov-”

The word freezes in his mouth, sliding back down his throat as he blinks against the sudden brightness of the sky outside the window.

The empty window.

“Steve?” Panic kicks him back into gear, making him rush forward, hitting the window frame with enough force it groans in protest. “Steve? No, no, nonono!”

The boat below the window is empty, knocking against the church with every lap of water, no longer held steady by Steve. The mist beyond the church has receded further, making way for glimpses of blue sky between the thinning clouds. Whirling around, Tony blinks the bright spots out on his eyes and he scans the room again, but there’s nothing there that hadn’t been before. There’s Steve’s skeleton, but not _his_ Steve. His living, breathing, brave, idiot Steve.

Who’d been dead longer than Tony had been alive.

“You could have said goodbye!” He yells, hurling the words around the room and out the window, feeling them crack and break and split his chest open until his gasping for air and hitching one painful sob after another. The world wobbles and blurs and goes grey and he wishes, hopes for another vision, anything to suggest the town is still cursed, that they’re still trapped here, but it’s just tears obscuring his vision. He clings to the window frame to stay upright, not sure he trusts himself to stand when it feels like his heart is being crushed inside his chest.

“You were supposed to say goodbye.” He barely hears himself speak, throat closing over and making it nearly impossible to speak. It’s his fault, he knows it is. If he’d listened to Steve, if he hadn’t come to the church, if he had looked inside. Steve had begged him and he’d ignored his pleas, ignored all the obvious signs of distress, so desperate he was to solve the mystery and get to leave. He hadn’t thought it’d mean leaving Steve behind though.

“I would have stayed if you’d asked me to.” He whispers, too little, too late, because Steve’s gone and all there is left to hear him is the peeling paint and rising damp and Steve’s skeleton in it’s cracked leather jacket. He looks away, pressing the sleeve of Steve’s jacket to his face, trying to find that familiar and comforting scent of warm leather and aftershave. He needs it to be there, needs it to be real; anything to prove that he hasn’t just been making the whole thing up in his head.

It still smells the same, comforting and warm, though he worries that maybe it isn’t as strong as before. The persistent knocking against the side of the church breaks it’s rhythm, falling silent so suddenly that Tony jerks upright, hauling himself up with the window frame. The boat has started to drift, turning away from the church, though not yet enough to be out of reach. Tony clambers up onto the window ledge, awkwardly dropping one leg down and stretching it out until his foot touches the boat. Balancing carefully, he guides the boat back against the side of the church, then drops down into the boat, clinging to the window ledge as the boat rocks violently. He casts one final look back into the church, feeling his throat constrict all over again when he looks at Steve’s skeleton. His chest aches viciously, like he has a hole bored through his sternum and right down to his heart, leaving it exposed and bleeding.

“I would have stayed.” He whispers back into the church, not sure if he’s talking to Steve’s remains, any lingering trace of his ghost that had been there, or if the words were purely for his own benefit. “Goodbye Steve.”

Starting the motor and steering the boat away from the church feels final, as though the trials of the last few days, since he crashed his car, have finally come to an end. He can feel the warmth of sunshine on his face, damp breeze against his skin as he guides the boat across the water and back to the pier below the hotel. He ties the boat to the pier before he climbs out, now that there’s no Steve to hold it steady for him. It brings fresh tears to his eyes, even as he wipes them away so he can see what he’s doing, the ache in his throat making it hard to breathe.

The elevator doesn’t even give him pause this time, he copies the movememts he’d seen Steve make each time, pulling the gate closed and shifting the lever to _Up_ , clinging to the bars of the cage to hold himself steady since Steve wasn’t there to hold his hand. He wipes more tears away, trying to chastise himself in his head, a voice sounding a lot like his father’s telling him that real men didn’t cry, but even that doesn’t have the heat behind it that it usually does. He really doesn’t care right now what Howard thinks of him; it wasn’t Howard who saved him from his wrecked car and looked after him. It wasn’t Howard who held his hand and slept beside him, and worried and cared about him. Who pulled him out of the water when the compressor stopped working. It had all been Steve. Beautiful, stupid, brave Steve.

Steve who’d left without saying goodbye.

The elevator shudders and bangs as it reaches the top, reminding Tony to get out of his head, dashing tears from his eyes again, trying to rub the too tight feeling out of his face, as he opens the gate and heads for the stairs. He goes straight past Schmidt’s room, not even bothering to the look inside, despite the fact the smoke has cleared to a thin, lingering haze. The lobby, when he gets there, looks different from what he’d grown accustomed to. The couches are worn, cushions torn and mouldering. The fish tank water is black, wallpaper bubbled and peeling. It smells too, like mould and vermin. The coffee table has listed to one side where the legs have started to bow out, the phone sitting a top it has had the wires chewed apart, the plastic insulation stripped away.

Looking at it, Tony feels a sarcastic laugh bubbling up out of his chest; no wonder the phone hadn’t worked. By the time the laugh reaches his throat it sounds like a sob, heaving his shoulders and ripping at his throat. It echoes around the wrecked lobby, reminding him of just how alone he is. Clamping a hand over his mouth to stop any more from following, he starts towards the front doors, sagged open, the glass panes in the doors broken, letting daylight stream in. Almost at the door he pauses, looking over his shoulder to the staircase leading up to the rooms, the carpet that once lined the stairs rotten and torn. He shouldn’t, he knows that, but he doesn’t even try and talk himself out of heading for the stairs and gingerly climbing them to the second floor. The corridor at the top looks like the lobby below, peeling wallpaper and rotten carpet, cobwebs looking like they’re all that is holding the ceiling together.

Pausing outside Steve’s room, Tony closes his eyes, trying to breathe through the fresh pain that is pushing to the surface, tries to ignore the small bit of useless hope that rises through it. The hope that if he opens the door, Steve will be on the other side of it with his concern in his eyes and apologies on his lips. He knows that Steve isn’t going to be there, but that doesn’t lessen the disappointment when he pushes the door open and finds the room empty. Despite being void of Steve, it doesn’t look as bad as he thought it might; the carpet it old and threadbare, but he can’t smell the mould as strongly as he could in the lobby. A higher floor, he rationalises, it might not have been hit by the flood, or at least had more of a chance to dry out over the years. He can’t bring himself to look at anything too closely, not wanting to replace the mental image of Steve’s room as it had been with what it really was.

Crossing the room he heads to the bed side table, tugging at the drawer handle; the drawer sticks, swollen wood trying to hold it’s place after years of being unopened. He puts more force behind it, bracing his other hand on the top of the table to hold it steady, and nearly stumbles back when the drawer finally gives and pulled out a few inches before sticking again. It’s enough though, he can see the edge of what he’d come for. Sneaking his hand into the gap, he catches the photograph between the tips of his pointer and middle fingers, pulling his hand back and bringing the photo with it. He takes it carefully in both hands, keeping his fingers on the edges of the stiff paper. It’s more faded than he remembers, more curled around the edges, but Steve’s face still smiles up out of the photo at him, Bucky grinning at his side. He stops himself from reaching out and touching the space Steve takes up, wanting nothing more than to fall into the photo and exist in a world where Steve is still alive and happy.

 _I wish I’d met you in another time._ The words echo inside his head, the wistfulness in them almost too much, but he can imagine it, for a brief moment, a flash of happiness as he thinks of him, Steve, Natasha and Bucky, all together. He can see it, bright and hot behind the tears in his eyes, feel it in the ache in his chest, so strong and tight like Steve’s arms around his shoulders. He closes his eyes, presses his hand over his mouth to hold in the grief, the loss of something he’d never even had.

“Fuck, Steve.” He whispers into his hand, words hitching and jerking on his tongue. “I’m going to miss you.”

For a moment he thinks he feels the cool touch of Steve’s hand against his cheek, fingers trailing through his hair, but when he opens his eyes the room is empty still. He can’t stand to be in the room any longer, Steve’s room that held a handful of memories of them together. Tucking the photo carefully into the inside pocket of Steve’s jacket, heading for the door without another look around the room. There’s no reason to linger any longer; with Steve gone, surely he can leave now, the last thing keeping the town locked in it’s curse undone.

Not stopping at all this time, he heads back down the stairs and out of the hotel, eyes linger on the trampled patches of grass and weeds where he and Steve had collapsed after their flee from Schmidt’s room. He presses his hands into the jacket pockets, closing his fingers around Steve’s dog tags, tightening his hand until the metal bites into his hand and he uses the pain as a distraction, tearing his eyes away from the flatted grass and forces himself to keep walking. The forest in lighter than it was before, sunlight streaming through the trees, cutting light paths through the gloom, it feels more peaceful than before, less ominous, but Tony would give anything for it to be like it was before, for Steve to be there with him, holding his hand and guiding him. He turns at tumble down shed, following the path towards town and the trail head towards the road.

He doesn’t even look back as he starts up the path towards the road, he’s not sure he can handle the finality of the empty space behind him. Whenever he’d thought about leaving, it had always been with Steve at his side, the two of them escaping the cursed town and getting on with life afterwards. He’d never thought far enough ahead as to what Steve might do once they’d left, he’d always just hoped that he’d want to stick around. Instead, he’s walking along the path alone, his chest and throat so tight it’s nearly impossible to breathe. With ever step he takes he hopes that his vision will start to go grey around the edges. He hopes for it, waits for it, a sign that the town is still cursed; welcomes the idea of passing out and waking up back in Steve’s room, Steve or Natasha watching over him, being given the chance of more time.

It doesn’t happen though. Each step comes after the other and the only thing obscuring his vision is the tears in his eyes. Barely able to see, unable to find the energy to wipe the tears out of his eyes, Tony only finds his phone when he kicks it a few feet along the path. He’d almost forgotten about it, in the end, the gadget that had been so important to him before, that had in the end been so useless. He remembers the incredulous look Steve had given him when he’d called it a phone, the raised eyebrow and wide eyes and he chokes out a laugh as he picks up the phone. Somewhere along the line the laugh catches and turns into a sob, clawing at his throat as it breaks free. He can’t stop them after that, one after another until he’s on his knees in the dirt and leaf litter, phone clutched tight in his hand as his whole body heaves with each sob. It’s nearly impossible to breathe, he doesn’t want to get up despite knowing that he should, he just keeps waiting for everything to go back to how it was, waiting for the next vision and to wake up back in Steve’s room.

It doesn’t happen.

When he finally calms his breathing down, the forest around him is quiet, but it’s not the ominous quiet of before, it’s peaceful, despite the sadness he feels. Or maybe because of it, he isn’t sure, but he kneels there for a long time, hand pressed over his face, trying to calm down. When his phone pings in his hand it is unnaturally loud in the quiet of the forest, startling him so much he topples backwards, nearly throwing his phone away from him. He hangs onto it, only by virtue of his fingers locking up in panic, staring bewilderedly at the screen as it lights up, notifications filled with messages and missed calls from Rhodey and Pepper. The battery symbol in the corner blinks an angry red, and the signal bar on the other side shows a weak one bar, but its more than he’d ever thought he’d see before he was back up at the road. The screen goes dark again as he stares at it, and it takes him a moment of panic to realise that it hadn’t gone flat, as he unlocks it and opens the messages from Rhodey.

It’s just one message after another, tone growing increasingly worried the more time goes on. He scrolls right back through to the last message he had sent Rhodey, saying that he’d just left the service station and he’d be there in a couple of hours. According to the message log, that had been Saturday morning at 2:34am. He scrolls back down the list of messages, seeing that Rhodey’s start at around 5:30am, when he suspects he woke up and discovered that Tony wasn’t there. Another message comes through, jumping him down to the bottom on the thread.

_Seriously, Stark, if you’re dead in a ditch somewhere I’m going to be so pissed at you. This is not funny._

It seems that Rhodey has gone from panicking to fed up and sarcastic; it’s not the first time that he’s noticed his friends do that, before quickly cycling back into panic. He glances at the time at the top of the screen, wondering just how long it’s been, the time displayed at the top reads 8:45am. He glances at the sky through the trees, looking at the patches of light blue between the clouds, but he can’t see the sun over the tree line yet. He’d honestly thought it was later than that. Pushing himself to his feet, he looks back at his phone, wondering if there’s enough battery life to call Rhodey, but he highly doubts it, so he taps out a message and hits send.

_I’m ok, platypus, i’m ok. had a car accidnet, but i’m alright._

He’s part way through typing another message to explain more when the phone rings in his hand, Rhodey’s name flashing across the screen, and despite the dwindling battery life he picks up, because he’s so desperate to hear Rhodey’s voice in that moment. “Hello, honeybunch. How are you?”

“How am I? Jesus, Tony!” Rhodey’s voice washes over him, slightly distorted by the bad signal, but comforting all the same. “I was starting to really worry, you arse. I thought you were dead in a ditch somewhere. How bad are you hurt? How bad was the accident? Where are you?”

The familiarity of Rhodey’s voice, hearing someone else speak in the hour or so that it’d had been since Steve disappeared is almost too much. His breathe catches in his throat, ribs aching as another sob forces it’s way out. “I’m okay. Car, not so much. I don’t know where I am though. Only just found signal, otherwise I would have called earlier.”

He makes himself walk, keeps moving forward, one step at a time, further up the path, hoping that he’s getting closer to the road, but really having no idea how far it even is.

Rhodey sighs, breath coming across as static. “Are you sure you’re alright, Tones? When you didn’t rock up this morning, I was worried the worse had hap-”

The phone beeps out a warning before the line goes dead, cutting off. Tony pulls it away from his ear, staring at the black screen that only flashes him an accusing dead battery symbol when he presses the power button. _This morning_ , what did Rhodey even mean by that? He’d supposed to be getting there days ago, not hours ago. It doesn’t make any sense. He’d spent days in the town with Steve, at least three, probably four, it had been hard to keep track of time, but it had been long enough.

The quite of the forest is broken by the sound of an engine, the soft whine of it growing into a louder purr as it gets closer. Despite his protesting ribs, Tony pushes himself to move faster, hurrying up the path around the slight bend just up ahead and suddenly the trees open up, making way for a wide swathe of bitumen cutting through the forest, two lanes edged with a low guard rail. Still clutching his phone in one hand, he hopes over the guard rail, feeling light headed by the sudden brightness outside of the trees, the smell of the warm tarmac beneath his feet.

He can see the vehicle now, a car approaching from his left, which, judging by the position of the sun, the vehicle is heading in the same direction he’d been trying to travel the night before. He throws his arm out, thumb up, heart in his throat as he waits and hopes, having no idea what he even looks like, whether anyone would even stop. The nose of the vehcle dibs down as it brakes, slowing down as it approaches him, rolling to a stop and pulling up still in the lane along side him. The driver leans over, rolling down the window and he’s met with a look of concern from a sun browned face.

“Hey, man, you okay?” The driver asks, giving him a once over, frowning. “You look like hell.”

Tony can’t help the slightly panicked laugh that escapes. “I crashed my car.”

The driver nods, gesturing with his thumb back over his shoulder. “Yeah, I saw that back there. I stopped, called out a bit, but no one answered. Is it just you? No one else?”

Tony nods, clutching his phone tight in his hand, throat constricting at the thought of Steve, making it impossible to talk.

The driver leans over again, opening the door. “Get in. There’s a town just a little bit further up, ‘tsgot a hospital. Better get you there to get checked out.”

He climbs into the car, collapsing into the seat like some one had cut his strings; it’s an effort to just close the door and he fumbles with his seatbelt long enough that the driver leans over and does it up for him.

“You alright, mate?” He asks, giving Tony a curious look as he puts the car back into gear and starts moving again. “‘m Clint, by the way.”

“Tony.” He replies, giving Clint a half hearted wave, unable to muster the energy or the will to offer to shake hands. “I might have bruised some ribs. Hit my head. I don’t know. Things-”

He struggles to know what to say. All he can think is all the hours he spent with Steve, the nights in the same bed, the days trying to solve the mystery of the town, and Rhodey’s words that suggest it had only been hours and not days since he crashed his car. It makes his chest ache, deep below the bruised ribs, tight and hot in a way that brings tears to his eyes all over again. He’d thought he’d run out of them by now. In the back of his mind he can hear Howard chastising him for being weak, for not being made of iron, to let his grief show, but then he thinks of Steve, the desparation in his voice and grip as he asked Tony not to look in the church. The sadness in his voice while filled in the gaps.

_I wish I’d met you in another time._

He tips his head towards the window, feeling the cold radiating off of the glass, brushing over his skin even though he isn’t touching it. Clint is talking, but he doesn’t have the presence of mind to try and follow what he’s saying, all he can hear, echoing in his head, are the last words that Steve’ had said to him. All he can think is that it’s his fault Steve left. If he’d just listened to him, if he hadn’t insisted on looking inside the church things would have been different. He stares out the car window and tries not to think about what things could have been like if he’d stayed away from the church.

As the road starts to rise, gaining elevation, Tony watches as the tree tops start to get lower, until he can see across the tops of them, taking in a sea of green. Beyond the trees, through the haze of distance, he thinks he can make out the dark shape of the hotel on the cliff top. He presses his hand to the window as though he could reach through the glass, through the distance and hold onto the hotel. He closes his eyes as it starts to slip from view, feeling tears slip down his cheeks.

Keeping his eyes closed he wishes for another time, where he could have kept Steve alive.

///

He dreams of Steve, of being back in the town with him, hand in hand as they search for something, he can’t pinpoint what it is, but it feels like it’s important. He dreams of Steve, with his blue eyes and blond hair and pale skin. Then the flood waters crash down on top of them, knocking the air from his lungs and rushing in to replace it, but he clings to Steves hand, even as his eyes turn dead and the skin peels away from his bones until all he’s left clinging to is a skeleton in a brown leather jacket.

He wakes up with tears in his eyes and a hard lump in his throat that he can barely breathe around. There’s a hand on his arm and another on his shoulder and a painfully familiar voice talking to him, words he can’t really focus on until the last tendrils of the nightmare disappear.

When he opens his eyes, Rhodey is right there, standing beside the bed he’s him, leaning over him, squeezing his shoulder gently, and carefully holding his right arm down. Glancing down, he recognises the vague ache in the back of his arm as an IV line, leading from his skin back to a bag of clear fluid hanging on a stand beside the bed.

“Hey there, Tones. You’re alright. Just in hospital.” Rhodey gives him a smile that he think is meant to be comforting, but it doesn’t really break through the concern in his eyes. “You’ve been pretty out of it.”

Blinking around the room, Tony can’t help but search the corners from someone he knows he won’t see, it is still bitter agony when he doesn’t see Steve, all the same. He glances back down at his arm, bringing his other hand over to poke at the tender flesh covered in tape to hold the IV in place. “How?”

He’s not sure what he’s asking, how did he get there? How did any of this even happen? How did I not realise that Steve was dead?

Rhodey squeezes his shoulder before shifting back and sitting down in the chair, though he keeps his hand closed around Tony’s wrist, thumb tapping a nonsensical pattern against the bony point of his wrist. “Some guy picked you up on the side of the road, not long after our call got cut off, by the sounds of it. Anyway, you sort of passed out in his car, freaked him out, he dropped you off here, and they eventually contacted me.”

“Good thing I have you as my emergency contact, hey, honeybunch?” Giving Rhodey a smile that he is sure looks half loopy with relief, Tony tries to sit up, it feels like every one of his ribs protest the move. “Oh, fuck me, that tickles a bit.”

Rhodey levels him with a unimpressed look. “If you’d get some sleep occasionally and didn’t drive tired, you’d be in less pain right now.”

“Victim blaming, my dear.” He mocks, trying to settle more comfortably on the bed. He didn’t remember it hurting this much while he was running around in the town with Steve.

“You’re not a victim in a single vehicle car accident, Tony. You’re lucky you’re not a road death statistic.” The words snap out, filling the room with tension, and Rhodey instantly presses a hand over his eyes and shakes his head. “Sorry, that was uncalled for. I just. Don’t worry me like that again, alright?”

He knows Rhodey is right. He took a risk, driving that late at night, taking his eyes off the road to look at the map, all the little things he did that he knows he shouldn’t have, but all he can think is that if he hadn’t made those dumb choices, he never would have met Steve. Maybe it would have been better if he never had. That bullshit, glass half full, attitude of it’s better to have loved and lost, than never loved at all forgets to mention just how much the losing part of it hurts. His throat feels thick, his eyes sting, but he doesn’t want to cry anymore, not now in hospital, when he should be so happy to see Rhodey again.

“I’m sorry, Jim.” His voice cracks a little, the painful lump in his throat making it hard to talk. He clears his throat, pokes at the IV line again, and looks away, blinking rapidly. “So, what did the doctors say? How long do I have to be here?”

Rhodey drops his hand away from his face, sighing as he stands up. “Doctor’s been in a couple times, you’ve woken up a couple times already, had a conversation with them, argued that you don’t need to be here, then gone back to sleep again. They said you’ve got a concussion, that you’re not making short term memories properly right now, but that should settle down over the next day or so. They want to get an x-ray of your ribs. You’re booked in one in an hours time.”

“Where’s my phone?” Trying not to move too much, he glances around, trying to spot it on the bedside table. It isn’t there, but a moment later, Rhodey fishes it out of his top pocket and hands it over. There’s an odd, metallic clink as Rhodey pats his pocket closed again, but Tony ignores that in favour of turning his phone back on. “You’re a dear, you even charged it for me.”

He flashes a grin at Rhodey and gets a begrudging smile in return. Once his phone loads, he swipes aside all the message notifications, knowing he should at least send something to Pepper saying he’s alright, but he imagines that Rhodey would have spoken to her already anyway. Opening up the internet browser he goes to start a search, but pauses when he realises that he doesn’t even know the name of the town he’d been in. In the end he searches for floods near his location, and after sifting through a bunch of recent flood warnings and a report about a burst water main, he finds an archive news file, badly scanned from an old news paper, with a grainy photo alongside depicting a blob that looks disconcertingly like the church. The text of the article has been transcribed below the scan, though it appears to be hit and miss, sections within the article unable to translate. What he can read lines up fairly well with the town he’s been in, town evacuated due to structural flaws in the dam at the top of the valley. The dam burst a day after the evacuation was finalised, and flooded the town, leaving a large portion of the town submerged after the water settled.

Leaning back against his pillows, Tony lowers his phone, trying to blink away the dampness he feels forming in his eyes. He’s too exhausted to cry, doesn’t have the emotional energy to deal with it right now. To distract himself he picks his phone up again and studies the article some more, picking the date of it up in the top corner.

The _23rd_ _of May_ _1949_.

The dust had barely settled from World War Two then. Steve might have been home for less than four years, before the flood happened. The thought makes his chest feel tight, a ache radiating there that has nothing to do with his bruised ribs. Struggling to get in a proper breath, Tony puts his phone down and turns his face away from Rhodey, not wanting to get caught with tears that he didn’t want to shed. He misses Steve something fierce, with every breath, every beat of his heart. It feels ridiculous though, to miss someone so much when he had only known him for a few days.

Though that thought feels wrong in his head now, something bugging him about the time. He picks up his phone again, glancing at the time and date displayed on the lock screen, and remembers Rhodey’s comment over the phone of it only having been hours, instead of days that he’d been missing. Other comments swim to the surface, about a concussion and talks with doctors that he doesn’t even remember. Maybe he’d just made it all up, everything was just a hallucination, the product of his impact rattle brain.

Using the newspaper article as a starting point, Tony tries to search more information about the town, and the flood, anything about the people in it. There’s nothing on Steve, no records of him in relation to the town, nothing about Schmidt either. He digs up another newspaper article from 1948 about the death of the town’s mayor, Alexander Pierce, and that a one James Barnes had been arrested under suspicion of his murder, but after that he can’t find anything.

He remembers the grinning man in the photo alongside Steve, and thinks, maybe, just maybe it had been real.

A nurse comes by later to take him down for an x-ray, which he goes through without complaint, though he hates that Rhodey isn’t there with him. He’s sent back to his room after that, to wait for the radiologist report and for a doctor to come see him. He’d forgotten how boring it can be in hospitals, but he doesn’t want to fall asleep again, in case he forgets again, and he can’t bring himself to talk to Rhodey about what happened, because the longer time goes on, the more he looks at the time and date on his phone, the less sure he is that anything even happened.

Besides, how do you tell someone that in the hours you were missing, you spent days hanging out with a guy who’d been dead for decades?

So he waits for the doctor to come, waits to be discharged, distracts himself by talking about everything but the accident and what came after. When Rhodey tries to bring it up, he plays on the amnesia and pretends he doesn’t remember anything after the service station. He doesn’t talk about Steve, he tries to not even think about him, until the fatigue catches up with him again, and he closes his eyes, only to rest them, he tells himself, but it doesn’t stop him jolting awake later, memories of water rushing into his lung and a skeletal hand being pulled out of his by the force of the flood. There’s tears in his eyes when he opens them, can feel the tight tracks they’ve left on his face, which he tries to rub away, only to discover that Rhodey is holding his right hand tightly.

“What’s up, platypus?” He croaks out, trying to smile, but his face feels brittle, like any excessive emotion will make it shatter.

Rhodey squeezes his hand tighter. “You remember what’s going on?”

The car accident, being picked up by a man, Clint, he thinks his name was, and then hospital. “My x-ray results come back yet?”

There’s a flash of relief that crosses Rhodey’s face as he nods, letting go of Tony’s hand and pushing himself to his feet. “Yeah, doc came by a little while ago with them, but you were sleeping. I’ll go get him.”

The doctor comes back, envelope tucked under her arm, but she doesn’t even open the x-ray films as she tells Tony that it’s all clear, no signs of broken ribs, that he just has to take it easy for the next few days, to manage the pain with painkillers, and to come back in if the pain is unmanageable. It’s short and sweet and she says that she just has to get his discharge papers organised and then he can leave.

Once she leaves, Tony finds the prospect of getting discharged soon makes it harder to relax and sit still. He’s already had enough of the hospital. Shifting around in the bed to try and get more comfortable, Tony looks over at Rhodey to find him studying him with a quizzical look, phone in one hand and something else closed in his other fist.

“What’s up, honeybunch?” Tony asks, trying to keep it light, but there’s something in Rhodey’s frown that sets him on edge.

Rhodey presses his lips together in a tight line, shakes his head, and then obviously thinks better of it, because he sets his phone down and rubs his face. “Who’s Steve?”

Tony freezes, the ache swelling beneath his ribs, crawling up his throat and jamming there. He thinks of blue eyes, blond hair and pale skin. Of warm leather and aftershave. Of dead eyes and a skeletal hand in his. He pushes the thoughts away, but they refuse to leave, his mind consumed by the memory of Steve’s cool hand in his, holding tight as they searched the town, the anguish on his face when he begged Tony not to look in the church tower.

_I wish I’d met you in anther time._

“Steve?” He tries to feign ignorance, effecting confusion, but he can feel the carefully blank expression on his face starting to crumble around the edges. The question of how Rhodey knew the same Steve spinning around in his head.

Rhodey gives him a look that tells him to cut the bullshit, hand clenching and relaxing around whatever it is he’s holding, making an odd, metallic scraping sound. “You were saying his name in your sleep. Tony,” he pauses, looking pained. “was there someone else involved in the crash? I need you to think about it, really hard? Should the cops be out there looking for someone else?”

He shakes his head, almost choking on a sob, because as hard as he wishes, he doubts anyone will find Steve, no matter how hard they look. “No, just me. Promise.”

Concern painted across his face, Rhodey glances down at his hand, then his phone, before lookign back up at Tony and reaching out to wrap a hand around his wrist. “Who’s Steve?”

Blinking away the stinging in his eyes, Tony bites his lip, trying to give Rhodey a smile, but he doesn’t think he manages more than a grimace. When he finally gets his voice to work, it’s small and whispery, strangled by the lump in his throat. “You’re going to think I’m insane.”

Rhodey gives him a sympathetic grin, squeezing his wrist. “Certifiably, but I’ve thought that for a long time. Nothing you say now, Tones, is going to make me think you’re any more insane.”

It’s true, Tony knows it. If there is one person he can trust with all his crazy bullshit, it’s Rhodey. So he tells him. Once he starts talking, he can’t stop, words tripping over each other in a manic rush to be told. He tells him about Steve, about the creepy hotel, about the even creepier hotel manager. About beautiful, mysterious, sad Natasha, and about the man he never met, but was so entwined in both her life and Steve’s. He tells him about the town, the expedition under water. The dead bodies he found. Salting and burning Schmidt’s remains. Everything he can think of to say, and Rhodey listens to it, all silently, face thoughtful as he takes it all in. When the words finally peter out, when Tony’s reached the point of stumbling up to the road and discovering only hours had passed instead of days, his face damp despite all his efforts not to cry again, Rhodey squeezes his wrist again, thumb pressed against his pulse.

“I’m mad, aren’t I? Tell it to me straight, platypus, are you going to have me committed?” He tries to joke, but his voice breaks over the words and the grin on his face wobbles.

Rhodey sighs, glancing away, back down at his phone. “I’ve got to say, Tony, it seems far fetched.”

Here it comes, Tony thinks, the judgement, the justifications and explanations as to what actually happened. He’s going to tell him it was all in his head and none of it ever happened. He isn’t sure he can handle hearing that from Rhodey right now.

“And some day soon, we need to have a serious conversation about you trusting a dive suit and compressor pump that haven’t been serviced regularly for the past seventy odd years, lighting petrol fires in enclosed spaces, and antagonising Nazis.” Rhodey continues, looking annoyed but also vaguely amused. “But if any of that happened, if any of it happened, then this Steve character had to have been there too, otherwise you’d be dead in a sewer unlikely to ever be found again.”

“So you’re saying you believe me?” Tony asks, tentatively.

Rhodey gives him a considering look before glancing back down at his hand. “I’m saying I believe you believe this all happened. I’m saying, while none of this makes any logical sense, it doesn’t make sense that it didn’t happen either. You said yourself it was a town you’d never heard of, and yet you knew it had been flooded. And, it’s right there on the map too, isn’t it?”

Glancing down at his own phone, Tony looks at the map he’d pulled up while he talked, showing the lake left behind by the burst dam, and the point of interest marker for the old town. “Yeah. But maybe I knew that and had forgotten it.” He’s not sure why he’s trying to explain it away, but after telling the story to Rhodey he can see how bizarre it sounds, how impossible it seems. Like a dream that seemed perfectly logical while he was having it, but once he woke up in made no sense at all.

“Maybe.” Rhodey hums thoughtfully. “But a concussion induced hallucination doesn’t explain these.”

Opening his hand and holding it out towards Tony, there are a set of dog tags lying in his palm. Tony stares at them, and the bead chain and the metal discs, remembering the cool press of them in his hand inside the pocket of Steve’s leather jacket. “What?”

“World War Two issue dog tags, belonging to one Private Steven G Rogers.” Rhodey confirms, shifting the tags in his hand so Tony can see the writing stamped into them. He taps at his phone, lighting up the screen. “He was part of the 107th infantry. No next of kin and no fixed address when he signed up, you can see the blank space where that should have been. Born 4th of July 1918. His service records show that he was discharged from the army at the end of the war, and after that there is no record of him. Just slipped off the radar. I guess, until he died when the dam burst in 1949.”

Tony reaches out, taking the dog tags from Rhodey’s hand and presses them into the palm of his own, tracing his fingers over the stamped letters. They were real, they had been real. Somewhere, somehow, he’d gotten his hands on the dog tags. Finding them while stumbling around if the forest made less sense than finding them under water outside of the church. He rubs at his eyes with one hand, still staring at the dog tags. “How?”

In his periphery he sees Rhodey shrug. “Just because the army and air force like to give each other shit, it doesn’t mean I’m locked out of the army military records. I called in a favour with someone I know in records. It was pretty easy since we had his enlistment number. They dug up the info and sent it through to me while you were having your last nap.”

Closing his fingers around the dog tags, Tony tightens his hold until the metal bites into his skin. He presses his closed fist to his mouth and shuts his eyes, feeling his heart rabbiting in his chest. “He was real.”

Rhodey’s hand rests on the back of his shoulder. “Steve Rogers was a real person. And either he was a real ghost, you’ve been researching dead people and ghost towns for no reason and then forgetting you researched them until you hit your head on your steering wheel.”

“Where’d you find these?” He has to ask, because he tries to wrack his brain but can’t remember where they’d been when he left the town. He must have had them on him somewhere still.

“Clint, that guy who brought you in. He found them in his car after dropping you off. Brought them back in a couple hours ago.” Rhodey replies, patting his shoulder. “Turns out he has a towing business too, I have to call him once you’re cleared to go and he’ll meet us back at your car with his truck.”

A nurse comes back then, letting them know the discharge papers are ready and waiting at the reception desk. She hands a bag over to Rhodey before she leaves, explaining that it’s the clothes Tony came in wearing, before ducking back out of the room. Rhode drops the bag on the bed then offers Tony and hand up. Once he’s up on his own too feet, trying to keep his back straight and not put too much pressure of his ribs, Rhodey undoes the knots at the back of the hospital gown Tony’s wearing.

“You get dressed, I’m just going to call Clint and let him know that we’re almost ready to leave.” Rhodey moves across to the other side of the room, giving Tony an illusion of privacy that he didn’t really need anyway.

Grabbing the bag off the bed, Tony shrugs his way out of the hospital gown and fishes into the bag, pulling out the first item of clothing he finds. Getting his shirt and jeans on as carefully as he can, Tony’s hunting around in the bag for his shoes and socks when his fingers brush something smooth and cool to the touch. He freezes for a moment at the familiar sensation, then, closing his eyes he grabs the object and jerks it out of the bag. He holds it, fingers curled around it for a long moment, too afraid to look at it in case he’s wrong. Sucking in a breath that hurts his ribs, Tony thinks he can actually smell it, over the disinfectant stench of the hospital, he can smell the worn leather and aftershave that are so distinctly Steve he’s sure it’s just a memory caught in his senses.

The one sided conversation he can hear Rhodey having on the phone fades out, everything seems to stop in the moment that he opens his eyes and finds himself staring down at Steve’s jacket, held in a white knuckle grip that creases the brown leather. His breath hitches, jolting his ribs and jamming in his throat, and he must make some sort of noise because suddenly Rhodey is there beside him, holding his shoulders and looking at him with concern, mouth forming words that Tony can’t hear over the frantic beat of his heart filling his ears.

The leather squeaks as he squeezes it too hard, with shaking fingers he reaches into the pocket, feeling paper against his skin. Closing his fingers around it, he pulls out the piece of paper, unfolding it to show the beautiful penmanship that he’d seen the first morning in the hotel, when the door wouldn’t open. He blinks down at the words, staring at them as they swim in out of focus through the tears in his eyes.

_Be careful. Yours, Steve._

“Tony?” Rhodey’s voice breaks through the pulse in his ears. “Tony what’s wrong?”

He tilts his head up to look at Rhodey, holds the jacket up as if Rhodey can’t see it already. “It’s Steve’s jacket.”

Turning his attention to the jacket, Rhodey frowns, reaching out to brush his fingers against the leather. “You took the jacket off of. You took his jacket from the church?”

Shaking his head, Tony rubs his thumb against the leather, feeling how supple it is, how well looked after. He swallows the lump in his throat. “No. This is the jacket Steve was wearing. When he got me out of the car. He gave it to me, in the rain. The first night. I kept wearing it, the whole time.”

Frowning harder, Rhodey purses his lips thoughtfully. “So. This is a ghost jacket?”

Catching Rhodey’s gaze, Tony nods, an idea forming in his mind that he can’t shake, no matter how unrealistic it is. “A ghost jacket that has no business existing outside of that cursed town. If it was part of Steve’s manifestation, then-”

“Why didn’t it disappear when he did?” Rhodey finishes for him, catching onto his line of thought, even though he looks more sceptical and less anxious than Tony feels. “And why is it here? If the curse stopped Steve leaving the town, and this is part of his manifestation, then what is it doing here, outside of the cursed area?”

He can feel his heart rate pick up, bumping against his ribs and making it hard to breathe. If Steve’s jacket made it out of the town, with him, then maybe, there was a chance that Steve could too. “What if?”

Shaking his head slowly, sympathy flashes across Rhodey’s face. “Don’t go getting your hopes up, Tones. You said it yourself, he moved on.”

It hits him, like the flood water in his nightmares, knocking the air out of his lungs and leaving him gasping. Steve’s gone. Steve died in 1949, stuck in a church tower, trying for high ground that wasn’t high enough, drowned by water from a burst dam. Not only was Steve dead, but Tony had caused him to confront his death, to accept it, to finish his unfinished business by seeing Natasha off safely. Because of Tony, Steve, every last bit of him, was gone.

Rhodey wraps his arms around his shoulders, pulls him into a hug, rubbing his back and whispering platitudes that Tony doesn’t want to hear. He feels the ache of loss all over again, standing there in a hospital room, the floor cold beneath his bare feet, clinging to a note from a dead man and an impossible jacket pressed against his chest.

“But, the jacket.” He argues, knowing it is useless, pointless to even hope that it meant something. A jacket and a note that had no business existing in the real world.

Rhodey runs his fingers through the hair on the back of Tony’s head, holding his tight as his shoulders shake and heave with every breath and every bitten back sob. “I don’t know, Tones. I really don’t. I can’t make sense of any of this.”

Burying his face against Rhodey’s shoulder, Tony tries not to think about the times he did that with Steve, the way Steve’s arms had felt wrapped around his shoulders. “It’s not fair. He didn’t even say goodbye.”

He feels Rhodey’s grip tighten, feels his fingers press against the back of his skull. “Life’s never been fair to you, Tones. But you’re strong. You’ll get through this, just like you get through everything else.”

He wants to argue that just for once he’d like to not have to survive through what life throws at him. For once, he’d like to be able to have something go right, to be able to keep something good in his life. He feels bad straight after that thought, because he has Rhodey, that one constant who has put up with him since college.

He just wishes that he’d been able to keep Steve as well. To have a chance to see where it might go. Even if it hadn’t worked out, he’d like to have seen it end with Steve being alive and going on with his life. For it to end because Steve had died decades before he was born just didn’t seem fair at all.

He’s not sure how long they stand there, Rhodey’s arms wrapped around him, but somewhere along the way his breathing calms down again and his toes get cold to the point where they feel a little numb. Rhodey guides him back to the end of the bed, and doesn’t even give him a hard time about having to help him put his shoes and socks on. They don’t talk as they leave the room and head for the reception desk, Tony isn’t sure if the silence makes it better or worse, but he can’t find the energy to do anything except clutch the note and Steve’s jacket and follow Rhodey along the hospital corridor. He keeps thinking, _what if_ , with each step. What if Steve could leave the town. What if helping Natasha move on had been enough for the town to let them go? What if he’d never actually had to go into the church?

He follows Rhodey to the reception desk, signs the discharge paper, pays the bill and takes the painkiller prescription from the lady behind the desk. After that he lets Rhodey steer him outside towards the car park, lets him self be bundled into the car, the whole time clinging to Steve’s jacket, rubbing at the leather between his fingers just to make sure that it is actually real.

Rhodey settles into the driver’s seat, keys in hand as he turns to look at Tony. “So, I told Clint we’d be there at two, that gives us an hour. How hungry are you?”

Tilting his head back against the head rest, Tony shrugs, only half aware that he’s still clenching and relaxing his hand around Steve’s jacket, where it rests in his lap.

“Well, then, I’m hungry, so I’m going to go get a burger, and I will sit here and eat it in front of you, and you aren’t allowed to complain about not having one.”

He rolls his head to the side to glare at Rhodey, knowing exactly what he’s doing. “That’s low, sourpatch. I can’t believe you’d do that to me.”

Rhodey gives him a smile with a heavy undertone of concern, reaching over and squeezing his shoulder once before starting the car. “So I guess that’s a yes to burgers then?”

“Always.” Tony replies, watching the streets and traffic move past as Rhodey pulls out of the car park and starts navigating his way around town. Maybe, if he acts normal enough, everything will go back to how it was before. He’d spend his week of vacation with Rhodey and then go home again, and somewhere along the way, maybe he’d stop missing someone he never should have met.

They eat their burgers in the car, in the fast food joint’s car park, because Tony doesn’t want to have to get in and out of the car more than he has to. Once Rhodey has thrown their rubbish away and Tony decides he’s a little more human feeling with some real food in his stomach, Rhodey pulls up the map on this phone that Clint had sent him, with directions to Tony’s wrecked car. It’s only a half hour drive out of town to find it, and it’s easy to spot as they wind their way through the forest road, considering that there is a large purple and white tow truck parked along the side of the road, near a section of guard railing that has been flattened.

When Rhodey pulls up a little further back, so his car is out of the way, it takes Tony a few minutes to work himself up to getting out of the car. He’s half sure that if he sees the car, it’ll look different from how he remembers, confirming that everything that happened was all in his head, despite the jacket clutched in his hand. Getting stiffly out of the car, Tony can feel the sun on his skin, the slight breeze in the air that smells like pine trees and water. He approaches the tow truck with Rhodey, greeted by a man who looks vaguely familiar, who he guesses must be Clint.

“Hey, mate.” Clint greets, giving him a stilted wave. “Glad to see your up and about, and you know, not dead from internal injuries or whatever you had going on there.”

Clint, Tony decides, is rather uncouth, but it’s kind of refreshing in a way. “Yep. Alive, kicking, all the rest. Sorry about passing out on you the other day.”

Clint waves him off, starting to muddle around the truck, sorting out cables, chains and shackles. “No big deal, mate. Now, if there’s anything you need out of the car, you should grab it before I start hooking things up, otherwise you’ll have to wait until I’ve dropped it off at the mechanics.”

Turning to look at the section of broken guard rail, Tony pulls in a breath, gritting his teeth at the way it makes his ribs throb, and approaches the damage one step at a time. Glancing down the incline beyond the shoulder of the road, Tony can see his car, at the bottom of the five metre declines; the bonnet crumpled in where it hit a wooden pole. He can’t see the back window from his vantage point, the car having spun around on impact, just the driver’s side of the car, and the tyre tracks cut through the mud. Studying the pole that he’d hit, he looks at the cross arms topped with ceramic insulators, drooping to one side, the whole pole now on a bit of a lean. There aren’t any wires anywhere in sight.

Looking back over to where Clint is getting the truck ready, seeing the way he keeps throwing looks and smiles at Rhodey, who’s standing there talking to him, Tony feels a little bad for interrupting. “Has the power company already been out to clean up the downed line?”

Clint stops part way through what looks like a blatant flirt, face scrunching up in confusion for a moment before he spots the power pole beyond Tony. “Uh, nah. That line’s been down for yonks. I think they salvaged all the wire off it back in the seventies. Dunno, my old man had a heap of it in the back shed for ages. Never did figure out if he nicked it or bought it.”

He feels an unsteady sort of laugh wobble out of his chest, breaking across his lips, and he has the petty urge to find Schmidt, point, laugh and cry _take that,_ because it wasn’t him at all who caused the black out. The town had been without power a lot longer than that, the infrastructure being taken away made sure of that. It is a useless, petty thought, though, since Schmidt is gone. Along with everyone else, Tone reminds himself.

Rhodey gives him a concerned look, moving away from the tow truck and his conversation with Clint to stand besides Tony. “You need anything from the car?”

Looking back at the car again, Tony shrugs, then nods. “Yeah, all my clothes and everything are down there.”

They make their way down the incline, Rhodey’s hand on his elbow the whole time, making sure he doesn’t trip or stumble, until they get to the bottom, Tony clenching his teeth as he tries to breathe despite the pain. From his new vantage point beside the car, he can see that the back window has been broken in, a mixture of glass and leaf matter littering the back seat. It could have broken on impact, he reminds himself. Or he could have broken it himself in order to get out. he turns his attention back to the boot of the car, opening it up to look inside. His bag of clothes is still there, along with his backpack, both of which Rhodey grabs, slinging them over his shoulders.

“Anything else?” Rhodey asks, casting a look back up the incline towards the tow truck.

“My tools.” Tony replies, reaching back into the boot and feeling only empty space where his toolbox usually was. It’s not there, no where in the boot of his car, then it hits him, he’d taken it from the car to fix the generator and then the gas compressor. His tools were probably still in the pump station.

“It was real.” He mumbles, tightening his grip on the jacket he hadn’t been able to let go of. “It really was real.”

“Tones.” Rhodey’s voice is full of sympathy, the hand on his shoulder a steadying force as his head spins.

Turning to look at Rhodey, he tries his best to smile reassuringly. “I left my tools in the town. I should go get them.”

Glancing from Tony to the car, up the slope to the tow truck and then back towards the forest, Rhodey shifts the bags on his shoulders. “Give me a second to drop these in my car and I’ll come with you.”

Looking towards the forest, Tony can just pick out the faint path leading off through the trees. “No, it’s okay. This is something I think I need to do alone.”

Rhodey squeezes his shoulder, like the last thing he wants to do is let Tony go wandering off into the woods by himself. “You sure?”

“Yeah, I’m sure.” Tony whisper, giving the forest a wistful smile, before turning a more animated grin back towards Rhodey, nudging him with one elbow. “Besides, if you stay here, you can help out the resident country bumpkin who I think might have a bit of a thing for handsome military types.”

Despite the glare Rhodey gives him, Tony’s pretty sure he can see a blush darkening his cheeks as he grumbles. “Well, I don’t have a country bumpkin thing, so cut it out.”

It feels good, to be back to the friendly ribbing, to act normal. He nudges Rhodey again, wiggling his eyebrows at him and giving him a toothy smile. “You totally do. So, you should definitely stay here and let him blow you against the side of the tow truck or whatever it is you kids do for fun, while I’m decidedly elsewhere.”

Shaking his head, Rhodey can’t quite hide the smirk trying to play on his lips. “The only reason I’m not punching you right now is because of your ribs, I want you to know that.”

Turning towards the path, Tony waves over his shoulder. “Don’t do anything I wouldn’t do!”

“That’s a very short list, Stark. If you’re not back in a half hour I’m going to come in there haul your arse back out!” Rhodey’s voice follows him in to the trees.

The path looks very different from how he remembers it the first night, in the rain. Light filtering through the trees, spotlighting patches of undergrowth, that rustle and move as small animals dart amongst the foliage. Now that he’s not in a desperate hurry to escape the place, or engulfed in grief, it is quite peaceful surrounded by trees. He follows the path as it winds along, keeping a careful watch on where he puts his feet, navigating his way over roots and fallen branches and exposed and loose rocks. It doesn’t feel like he’s walked far at all before the trail opens up into the small clearing containing the tumble down remains of the tool shed. He pauses at the fork in the path, looking at the one leading off to the right, towards the hill overlooking the town. He knows he should take that, should just head straight for the pump station and see if it’s accessible, see whether he can reach the sewer and retrieve his tools, but his gaze keeps jumping back to the path that leads towards the hotel.

He wants to go there, despite knowing he shouldn’t. He should just grab his tools and head back to where Rhodey and Clint are waiting for him. He should just put it all behind him and forget it like some sort of dream. However, when he looks down, he catches sight of the jacket still clutched in his hand. He lifts it up, pressing his nose to the leather and breathing deep. If he closed his eyes he could pretend Steve is right there with him, but he keeps his eyes open, staring blankly at the ground. As he shifts the jacket between his hands he hears something crinkle. Holding it up again, he opens it up, reaching into the lining of it, finding the internal pocket and the hard line of something tucked inside it. He extracts the photo, yellowed with age and worn along the edges, with a slight crease in one corner now.

Steve and Bucky smile up at him from the photo, so young and carefree despite being dressed in military uniforms. He holds the photo carefully, hovers his thumb near the image of Steve, wanting to touch but not daring to damage the photo at all. Glancing up at the path that leads towards the hotel, he follows the crooked line of the path as it disappears between the trees.

“One last time.” He whispers to himself, feeling his heart ache in his chest and his throat get tight. “Once more, for closer.”

Following the path as it winds through the trees, Tony tries to prepare himself for what he might see, everything seems a little different from when he was here last, as though whatever time bubble the curse had caused has popped. He half expects that the hotel will no longer be standing, or at least so decrepit that it’d be dangerous to get close to it.

As the path opens up he blinks against the onslaught of sunlight, revealing the beautiful vista of the grassy cliff top and the uninterrupted expanse of water beyond. The hotel stands on the edge of the cliff, looking slightly more crooked than before, slumped to one side, the windows empty, the entrance door ajar. The gate in front of the hotel swings in the gentle breeze, squeaking a protest at every movement, the sign advertising the hotel hangs from one nail, barely hanging on, the faded lettering telling a name that is different from the one Tony remembers.

_The Crowned Head Hotel._

It’s less macabre than the name he saw the first night, Tony will admit that. Yet another clue as to the nature of the town that Tony had written off as bad taste instead of evidence. He shakes his head, catching the gate on the in swing so he can pass through without being hit by it.

As he gets to the top of the final rise, before the hotel he stops in his tracks, eyes drawn out towards the water, the clear expanse of blue, reflecting the sky and the few white clouds that dot it. The church isn’t visible anymore, the tower no longer protruding from the water, but that hardly matters to Tony, not compared to what he can see. Deep in his chest, something aches so viciously he squeezes his eyes shut, hand pressed to his chest, trying to force himself to breathe, once, twice, before he opens his eyes again. It’s not a trick of the light, or his imagination, he’s sure of it. It remains, even after he closed his eyes.

Standing near the edge of the cliff staring out over the water, hands in his pockets, wind ruffling his hair, is a figure so familiar that Tony feels like his heart is going to burst.

He clutches the jacket, a lump in his throat as he crosses the grass towards the cliff’s edge, not sure he’s going to be able to speak. Not sure what he’ll say if he can. He comes a halt a couple metres away, not sure he can go any further, not sure he’s brave enough to reach out, just in case he finds it’s all an illusion, his grieving mind playing tricks on him.

Distantly, he hears himself speak, words he isn’t sure how he managed, holding the jacket up, the leather squeaking beneath his fingers. “Hey, soldier. Thought you might like this back.”

Steve goes still, shoulders going rigid beneath his white shirt. His head drops forward, and Tony can see the minute movement of of his shaking it, and his shoulders heave several times as he takes deep breaths. Slowly, he straightens up, shoulders setting in determination as he turns around. Tony can’t help but stare at him, can’t help the choked sounding sob that forces its way out of his chest.

Steve stands there, staring back at him, eyes wide like he can’t believe what he’s seeing. His mouth works, forming silent words and he shakes his head again. There’s colour to his face that Tony hadn’t seen before, no longer looking impossibly pale, but so much more alive.

“Hi.” Tony utters, wanting to say so much more, but not knowing what to say. He wants to ask why Steve’s still there, wants to know if he ever even left. Wants to yell at him for making him think he was really gone. Wants to demand to know why he isn’t. He can’t find the words for it though, locked down behind the thrumming feeling of relief, because Steve is right there, nearly within arms reach, after he’d never thought he’d see him again. Looking positively golden with his hair catching the sunlight.

“Tony.” Steve says his name like it’s a prayer, taking a hesitant step forward, his hands jerking out of his pockets and making an aborted movement to reach for Tony. “You came back.”

Tony watches as emotions play across Steve’s face, shock, concern, happiness quickly pushed aside for something so positively grief stricken that he thinks Steve doesn’t believe he’s real. Briefly he wonders how long it has been for Steve. Days in the town had only been hours in the real world, he knows that much, and it had been over twenty four hours since he’d staggered out of the forest onto the road.

“You never left.” It should have been an accusation, but he’s just so relieved that Steve is still there, he doesn’t care about anything else right now.

In a few quick steps, Steve crosses the remaining space between them, wrapping his arms around Tony and pulling him against him. Tony winces, feeling his ribs jolt, but the pain seems secondary to the fact that Steve is right there, solid and warm against him, smelling like warm leather and aftershave, arms tight around him. He can hear Steve’s breaths hitching, feel the way his body shakes against his, feel his hand cradling the back of his head, fingers tangling in his hair. He clings to Steve, just as desperately, pressing his hands against his back, feeling every rise and fall of his breathing, pressing his face against Steve’s chest where he can feel to too quick beat of his heart.

He’s not sure how long they stand there on the cliff top, clinging to each other, but eventually he feels Steve’s breathing calm down, his body stop shaking, and he leans back enough that he can see Steve’s face, the wondrous look there, like he hasn’t quite let himself believe it’s real.

Steve blinks down at him, eyelashes clumping together damply and tear tracks on his cheeks. His fingers keep stroking through Tony’s hair, softly brushing it back from his forehead. He tilts his head down, pressing his forehead to Tony’s, breath fanning across his face. “I missed you.”

Bringing one hand around, Tony touches the side of Steve’s face, wiping his thumb against the damp line on his cheek. “I missed you too, darling.”

“Is this even real?” Steve whispers, voice sounding strained, eyes still open and staring blearily at Tony despite the proximity.

For once he doesn’t want to question the science behind it, the plausibility of the situation. If it’s magic, he’s happy to just go with it, for once. “I think we found our other time, sweetheart.”

Closing his eyes, he tilts his face up, just enough, brushing his lips against Steve’s, feeling Steve lean into the kiss, feeling the way his breath stutters across his face at the kiss, and nothing else matters.

**Author's Note:**

> Warnings: (be warned, spoilers)
> 
>  
> 
> Steve, Schmidt and Natasha all died in the flood, their ghosts trapped in the town in some sort of time pocket. When Tony crashes his car he enters the time pocket, which may or may not indicate that Tony is also dead. Everyone in this story may or may not be dead, it is entirely up to you. There is a hopeful, open ending though, in which Steve may or may not have somehow magically come back to life.


End file.
